An organization called Coalition for a Safer Web founded and presently overseen by former US ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg, sued Apple in federal court on January 17 for allowing access to the increasingly popular Telegram app on its platforms.
Coalition for a Safer Web and Greenberg contend that Telegram “is being used by hate groups and extremists to attack the Capitol.”
Apple Insider reports:
Filed on Sunday at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the lawsuit from Ambassador Marc Ginsberg and the Coalition for a Safer Web charges Apple with allowing Telegram to be available in the App Store. This “despite Apple’s knowledge that Telegram is being used to intimidate, threaten, and coerce members of the public.”
Billed as a “non-partisan, not-for-profit advocacy organization” to force the removal of extremist and terrorist content from social media platforms, the Coalition claims Apple is failing to follow its own policies and guidelines regarding app content in relation to Telegram. In doing so, Apple allows Telegram’s more malicious users to continue their activities.
Ginsberg was educated abroad and has been involved in US politics since the early 1970s, when he became a legislative aide to Senator Edward Kennedy. In 1994 he was named US Ambassador to Morocco by President Bill Clinton.
Ginsberg is a foreign affairs contributor to several major news outlets and has ties to the US intelligence community, in addition to the Rand Corporation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Brookings Institution. He is chief executive officer of One Voice Movement Foundation, an international NGO advocating for a “two state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Ginsberg presently serves as president of Coalition for a Safer Web, which is headquartered in Washington DC.
Ginsberg is no stranger to waging anti-free speech campaigns against social media outlets for allegedly “aiding and abetting” terrorists, arguing how the content of such platforms contributes to “online radicalization.” In 2016, Ginsberg told CNBC,
“Google/YouTube is complicit in aiding and abetting terror because it has failed to voluntarily do what is necessary to remove the most egregious calls for murdering Americans by homegrown lone wolves.”
Now, in addition to targeting “homegrown” terrorists” and “lone wolves,” Ginsberg has set his sites on “seditionist neo-Nazi[s] fleeing Parler” for Telegram, Gab, and other “web-based roach hostels,” according to a January 14 Tweet.
Ginsberg and his organization’s lawsuit comes within one week of the Anti-Defamation League sending a letter to the US Department of Justice demanding an investigation off Gab.com, the Christian-led online alternative to Twitter.
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