EU Tightens Grip On Telegram With New Probe Following France Arrest
The EU is putting additional pressure on Telegram, after one of its member countries, France, arrested the platform’s co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov.
The EU has launched an investigation into the number of users the platform has in the bloc, and whether the number reported by Telegram is correct.
The importance of this is the EU’s ability to censor using the Digital Services Act (DSA), which applies services with over 45 million users.
In February, Telegram said that their number is 41 million, but the EU has chosen precisely this moment to start looking for ways to determine if this reporting was accurate – or, more likely, try to prove that it isn’t.
The EU Commission’s Joint Research Center is tasked with the job, while there are “ongoing talks with the app” regarding the way it arrived at its figure, the Financial Times writes , without expanding on the “ongoing talks” point.
EU Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier is quoted as saying that the EU “has a way” to determine whether Telegram’s reporting is true, using “our own systems and calculations.”
