Which also isn't great for the platforms. Hank Green quote: "If platforms don't prioritize high quality content, they dig their own graves. And Facebook has a lot of shovels."

Long term, it's not in the a platforms interest to push mildly engaging slop. Keeping an eye on FBs WVCR in the meantime...

Haha!

@integrity-inst.bsky.social

But we haven’t really turned on the microphone yet here 🙈

With @mattmotyl.bsky.social , Jenn Louie, Spencer Gurley, and Sofia Bonilla.

www.linkedin.com/in/jennslouie
www.linkedin.com/in/spencergu...
www.linkedin.com/in/sofia-g-b...

Big thanks to @katieharbath.bsky.social and Glenn Ellingson for being leaders in that work, and to the dozens of members who contributed!

Check out all our elections program work here:
integrityinstitute.org/elections-in...

Read our full summary of the investigation here:

integrityinstitute.org/news/institu...

And the Wired article here:

www.wired.com/story/telegr...

It remains available in the app stores, and it wasn't in the list of platforms that will be regulated as VLOPs under the DSA. Telegram apparently reported that their monthly user count was below the threshold, but that just doesn't seem plausible and the EC is thankfully looking into it.

This poses a real challenge to societies: What do we do when a platform that is perfectly happy distributing violent content hits a billion users?

Telegram is my go-to example of why government regulation of social media platforms is necessary. But so far, it's been able to evade accountability.

And of course, the "restricting" of the channels is super leaky. There's plenty of examples of messages from restricted channels being shared in non-restricted channels. As with most solutions to problems on social media that attack the problems at a superficial level, it just doesn’t work!

Which is very strange! I will never understand thinking like "Oh, this channel has racist terms right in the channel name and lots of hateful messages about various ethnic groups. We definitely want to hide this from Google and Apple, but let's keep it on the platform."

Telegram hides lots of hate and violence filled channels from displaying on the version of the app from the Apple App Store and Google Play, but still keeps them on the platform and they are visible in a special "unrestricted" version of Telegram they put out, as well as the web browser version.