The former US ambassador to Morocco, Mark Ginzberg, and the non-profit organization Coalition for a Safer Web headed by him filed a lawsuit against Alphabet, the parent company of Google, demanding that Telegram be removed from Google Play.
It is reported Bloomberg.
The plaintiffs want a California court to require the Telegram messenger to be removed from the Google Play store.
Telegram is used "to spread threats, as well as encourage and coordinate racist violence," notes Ginsberg. In his opinion, this happened especially often after the death of the African-American George Floyd, as well as the inauguration of the new US president, Joseph Biden. The lawsuit states that some Telegram users urged others not to participate in new protests in support of ex-president Donald Trump, but to organize surprise attacks across the country. It also says that Telegram is used to sell drugs.
Among other things, Ginsberg accuses Telegram of promoting the spread of anti-Semitism. He claims that, being a Jew, he was the target of an assassination attempt twice because of his religious views.
After the storming of the Capitol on January 6, Google removed the social network Parler from its store, as some of its users came out in support of the violence, notes Ginsberg. "Google has not taken any action similar to the one it took against Parler to force Telegram to improve its content moderation rules," the lawsuit says.
Note that this organization previously sued Apple to remove the Telegram messenger from the App Store.
