This can be seen from the documents released by the Ministry of Justice after an appeal to the Open Government Act.
Originally, Mark Rutte was even going to personally travel to Abu Dhabi to deliver the message. However, this summit was canceled “because of COVID,” the Justice and Security Ministry said. Eventually the Dutch ambassador to Abu Dhabi was sent in place of the prime minister.
Telegram, founded by native Russians and officially headquartered in the British Virgin Islands, has its office in Dubai.
More than 100,000 far-right messages per month
The diplomatic contact shows how tough the Dutch government is with Telegram. The social media platform, which already has more than 1.6 million users in the Netherlands, has developed into a hotbed of extremist content in recent years. In March, NOS counted more than 170,000 far-right messages on the platform. According to the broadcaster, this number is rapidly increasing. The platform has also often been used during the coronavirus period to organize large-scale violence against the police, such as in Schilderswijk at the end of 2021. The group that projected the text “White Lives Matter” onto the Erasmus Bridge at the beginning of this year it was also active on the platform.
Where other social media outlets like Facebook have made efforts in recent years to combat hate speech and incitement to violence, Telegram has done so sparingly. For example, the group White Lives Matter is still on the air despite the fact that a number of those involved have already been convicted of gang slur. The same goes for the Telegram group, which has called for the murder of police officers in Schilderswijk in layman’s terms.
Previous research by BNR has already shown that the Dutch government has little or no technical resources to prevent the dissemination of this type of content. In 2021, for example, the police took two groups of Telegram conspiracy theorists offline, but had to confiscate the administrator’s phone to do so. In other social media, this is organized through official procedures.
Grapperhaus seized the initiative, resulting in riots against the crown
Internal documents show that then Justice Minister Ferd Grapperhaus therefore also wanted to intervene in another way, namely by asking for help from the United Arab Emirates to ‘get closer’ to Telegram. “Hate speech and incitement in relation to the Covid riots,” along with right-wing extremism, are cited as the primary reason for this.
The ministry has been working closely with Germany on the file, according to the documents. In the same month that the ambassador urged the UAE to take action, Telegram took offline sixty German Telegram groups spreading disinformation about the corona virus, among other things.
The Netherlands also wanted the Emirati government to ask Telegram to appoint an official point of contact where Dutch authorities could submit content removal requests, among other things. This is mandatory under European Internet law. The documents discuss the possibility of imposing a fine on the company if it fails to meet these requirements “even if it is established outside the EU”.
Grapperhaus has kept the possibility of a ban open
At the time, the German government even threatened to ban the app. Justice Minister Dylan Yesilgöz called the ban in response to parliamentary questions “at least at the moment a step too far”. This possibility is explicitly mentioned in documents released by the Ministry of Justice and Security, largely created under Grapperhaus. “In the long run, the minister cannot rule that out either [Telegram] will no longer have access to the web in the EU,” reads one of the documents.
Investigations with the Ministry of J&V and Foreign Affairs show that no official response ever came from the Emirates to the request for help. Furthermore, there is still no point of contact for the Dutch government.
The UAE embassy in The Hague did not respond to requests for comment. The UAE itself is interested in the messaging service. Through its sovereign state fund, the Gulf state has invested $150 million in the messaging platform in 2021.