(Yeah, who was saying this for the past decade about how our 'soft power' system works overseas?)
from RT
The US and its CIA-controlled “soft power” arm have used the encrypted social media app Telegram to foment riots and protest movements against foreign governments it deems undesirable, former Trump administration official and free speech activist Mike Benz has said.
The comments were made during an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson on Wednesday. Benz, a State Department official under the administration of former President Donald Trump, now runs the free speech watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online.
Carlson asked Benz about a potential US role in the arrest of Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov in France last week. A court in Paris charged Durov on Wednesday with complicity in several crimes perpetrated through his app, as well as failing to cooperate with the French authorities.
While the former diplomat did not speculate, he noted that Durov’s arrest aligns with the pattern of “soft power” tactics the US has pursued in the past.
The US has championed free speech globally for decades, “in large part” because it allows the country to build resistance and political or paramilitary movements “in countries where the US State Department seeks political control,” the former official said. Durov’s end-to-end encrypted social media app Telegram has been instrumental in this effort, Benz claimed.
The reason “26 US-government-funded NGOs” condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018 was that “the US State Department was using Telegram,” utilizing its encryption and local popularity “to foment protests and riots within Russia – just as they did in Belarus, Iran, Hong Kong, and attempted to do in China,” the former State Department official said.
The app’s encryption is a powerful means of evading state control over media and allowing “US-funded political groups or dissidents to garner tens of thousands of supporters with relative impunity,” he added...
read more here
The "Resistance News Network" channel alone on Telegram is more valuable than the entirety of the X/Twitter platform (on which it is banned).
ReplyDeleteYou cannot get information on any of the Silicon Valley platforms about the Resistance in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Palestine that Telegram delivers. If they can provide it, it's likely because they yanked it from Telegram.