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“Hope Not Hate have been calling for action against Telegram for many years. Tragically, the lack of action against the platform has allowed it to remain a hub for violent extremists, and it is our communities that are paying the price.”
Addressing his weekly Cabinet on Tuesday morning, the Prime Minister reiterated that the Government would impose the “full force of the law” against rioters and those who incited hate online.He told ministers: “When I went to Southport I spoke to police who described what it was like to attend the mass stabbing of little girls and then to be back on duty the next day in riot gear, having bricks thrown at them. “This is something no one would have ever wanted to see and we need to be calling it out for what it is. It is not protest. It is violent disorder and needs to be treated as such, as criminal activity.” He added that “99.9 per cent of people across the country want their streets to be safe and to feel safe in their communities, and we will take all necessary action to bring the disorder to an end.”
While some of the far-right Telegram channels linked to disorder appear to have been closed on Tuesday, it is unclear whether the platform removed the channels itself – and more have since sprung up to replace them.
Telegram, founded by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who is French-Emirati and Dubai-based, in 2013, differs from other social media sites in a number of ways which make it more difficult to control and block extreme content.
Even when attempts are made to ban content, the nature of the platform means it is a “game of whack-a-mole,” said Sid Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who has been studying the use of Telegram to disseminate information and organise riots.
“One of the big challenges is the fact that these channels can be recreated very easily,” he said. “What we’ve seen in the case of some of the channels, post the tragedy in Southport, was that they got brigaded by people antithetic to the views being voiced there, and were either locked down or closed down, but just created again. “I’ve seen a few of the incitement of violence channels shut down this morning, but it’s hard to say whether that’s because the Government cracked down on them, or whether it was pressure on the platform, or whether it was just because they had too many people who were not part of the group joining and pushing it in a way they didn’t want.” Mr Venkataramakrishnan said many accounts that are not UK-based have been sharing information about protests and whipping up support. “There are football hooligans based mainly in western Europe, Australian nationalists, US neo-Nazis,” he said. “Even when a UK channel was banned today, a US-based one was again promoting where protests will take place to try and spread the message, which creates a kind of resilience to banning.”
In a statement Telegram said: “Telegram’s moderators are actively monitoring the situation and are removing channels and posts containing calls to violence. Calls to violence are explicitly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service.
“Moderators use a combination of proactive monitoring of public parts of the platform, sophisticated AI tools and user reports to ensure content that breaches Telegram’s terms is removed.”

https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/starmer-called-tough-sanctions-against-telegram-3-years-ago-3212758