🇲🇩 About a year ago, while I was stuck in Paris, the French intelligence services reached out to me through an intermediary, asking me to help the Moldovan government censor certain Telegram channels ahead of the presidential elections in Moldova.
After reviewing the channels flagged by French (and Moldovan) authorities, we identified a few that clearly violated our rules and removed them. The intermediary then informed me that, in exchange for this cooperation, French intelligence would “say good things” about me to the judge who had ordered my arrest in August last year.
This was unacceptable on several levels. If the agency did in fact approach the judge — it constituted an attempt to interfere in the judicial process. If it did not, and merely claimed to have done so, then it was exploiting my legal situation in France to influence political developments in Eastern Europe — a pattern we have also observed in Romania 🇷🇴
Shortly thereafter, the Telegram team received a second list of so-called “problematic” Moldovan channels. Unlike the first, nearly all of these channels were legitimate and fully compliant with our rules. Their only commonality was that they voiced political positions disliked by the French and Moldovan governments.
We refused to act on this request.
Telegram is committed to freedom of speech and will not remove content for political reasons. I will continue to expose every attempt to pressure Telegram into censoring our platform. Stay tuned. 🤝
@reinedumalaise@virgomoth_ stp juste lit le message a un moment, blaguer sur le fait de frapper les personnes etant hetero ne fait que tirer une balle dans le pied des gens qui se battent pour que les autres orientations qui elles sont opprimes soient respectees. Vous soutenez aucune cause juste avec ca
@reinedumalaise@virgomoth_ Après dire que c’est une blague change rien au tweet tsais + ca sert à rien de dire que tu blagues quand on te fait comprendre que tu combat pas la repression des orientations sexuelles en incitant la haine d’une d’elles la boss 💪