This will be interesting. Some background for the discussion: - Germany has a different take on freedom of speech from the US. There are things that you cannot say (holocaust denial, inciting racial violence). We can argue about this, but it's deeply ingrained in the legal system and unrealistic to change - Germany has a special law regulating responsibilities and content moderation in social media (NetzDG, think sec…
(1): Messaging in the sense of a digital continuation of letter writing.
Still, it's a stupid move.
There are endless alternatives.
And the problem isn't really caused or amplified by Telegram, Telegram is just an arbitrary chosen tool which happen to meet the requirements for the given use case.
It's not even the best tool out there for the given use case.
In the end this is nothing more then trying to find a scapegoat to blame a out of control situation on. A situation caused by years of political/social negligence of increasingly out-of-touch political parties combined with out-of-touch media.
The choice of choosing it as a scapegoat already shows how out of touch it is, I mean like did they forget that it's one of the most widely used messengers in Germany by all parts of the society?? You are literally telling people which have gotten increasingly suspect of the government and media that the tool they are nicely using since years is supposedly easier. Putting people into a very obvious perceived difference between their reality and what you tell them, without a good reasoning basis, is a pretty sure fire way to lose more trust.