Amsterdam bans Telegram for its municipal employees

Since last year, Dutch civil servants have already had access cut to popular apps linked to Russia and China

The City of Amsterdam has banned employees from using the social media app Telegram on their work phones citing precautions about the risk of foreign espionage as well as the documented use of the app for criminal activities.

Telegram is a “safe haven for hackers, cybercriminals, and drug dealers,” a spokesperson for Amsterdam’s IT alderman Alexander Scholtes told BNR.

This makes Amsterdam the first municipality in the country to ban the use of Telegram to its employees formally.

The app has been gaining notoriety in recent years as a chat platform used by drug dealers, firearm traders and child or revenge porn aficionados. These activities even prompted the Dutch Parliament to consider banning its use nationwide but then criticism about curbing the freedom of expression outweighed in the debates.

Risk of foreign espionage

What did happen last year, however, was the nationwide ban on the use of apps such as TikTok, VK, Temu and AliExpress - as far as civil servants’ work phones are concerned.

What’s immediately obvious about these applications is that they are all based in Russia and China, countries that are well known to use all means of waging hybrid warfare against the West.

The banned apps are quite popular – two of them are actually shopping sites for low-cost goods from China – and so is Telegram. It has nearly a billion users worldwide, including nearly 2 million in the Netherlands.

While it’s well known that its founder, Pavel Durov, is Russian, he himself has chosen to leave Russia claiming that he wanted to keep the app free of interference and politics.

The Telegram head office is based in Dubai, and the company is officially registered in the Virgin Islands.

Telegram later underlined for TheMayor.EU that they moderate content on their platform in a proactive way and by monitoring user reports. They further stated that they strictly abide by DSA regulations and process all takedown requests.