MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th January, 2021) Marc Ginsberg, the president of a Coalition for a Safer Web nonprofit organization that calls for the removal of extremist content from social media, on Monday sued Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, urging the California court to remove the Telegram app from the Google Play store, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
Earlier in January, the Washington-based organization filed a similar lawsuit against Apple. The group demands that Apple handles Telegram, the app created by Dubai-based Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, the same way it treated social network Parler, which was popular among former US President Donald Trump supporters and was removed from the App Store for failing to respond to threats of violence related to the January 6 Capitol riots. Ginsberg, who is also a former US ambassador to Morocco, has told the Washington Post that Telegram "stands out by itself as the superspreader [of hateful speech], even compared to Parler."
"Google has not taken any action against Telegram comparable to the action it has taken against Parler to compel Telegram to improve its content moderation policies," Ginsberg's suit read, as cited by the media outlet.
Both, Google and Telegram, did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comments.
Last week, Durov said that Telegram had cracked down on hundreds of public calls for violence in the wake of the January 6 US Capitol unrest.
In the aftermath of the riots, social media giants like Facebook and Twitter banned Trump's accounts and stepped up their efforts to combat far-right extremist content. This prompted some people to migrate to Parler, which was eventually banned by Google, Apple and Amazon from their platforms.
