For roughly an hour this week, Telegram vanished from Apple’s App Store. Even during that blip, it was a stunning absence for such a major app: an avenue of communication for more than 1 billion users around the world, used widely as a secure platform for people who live in countries under censorship. Apple later revealed that it had removed the app due to the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and restored it once that content was removed.
But the decision once again stirred up questions and confusion about Apple’s moderation policies and how it treats different companies. And one company in particular sprang to many people’s minds: X, the Elon Musk-owned platform that stayed on the App Store even as sexualized Grok-generated images of children flooded the platform. What led to Telegram’s removal but X’s ability to stay online?
The answer may be more political than technical. “When you are enforcing your content moderation policy against an entire platform, you are subjecting yourself to the blowback that will happen,” Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown, tells The Verge.
Both Telegram and X have had their fair share of controversies. Telegram, which is headquartered in Dubai, garnered a reputation for having a laid-back approach to content moderation.
“Removing X would have likely caused a firestorm of political response against Apple.”
In recent years, local governments have begun pressuring the app to delete content and impose new restrictions. In 2017, for example, Telegram began removing “terrorist-related content” after receiving threats from Indonesia, while Germany considered banning Telegram in 2022 over claims it facilitated hate speech. Things came to a head in 2024, when French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, the Russian-born CEO and founder of Telegram, accusing him of “complicity” in illegal actions related to illegal transactions and CSAM. (As of last year, France’s inquiry into Durov remains open.) Last month, Russia charged Durov with facilitating terrorism. The Russian government alleges Durov allows Ukrainian spies to use Telegram to plan attacks on the country, to which Durov responded with a picture of himself flipping off the camera.
Telegram has since taken a harder look at its content moderation policies, changing its stance on private message moderation, discontinuing some “misused” features, including one that allowed users to find and message others nearby, and by complying with court orders asking for information on users suspected of criminal activity. The messaging app has also ramped up its detection of illegal material.
That’s all to say that, while large and important, Telegram is also seen as a nuisance politically and a problematic platform in its own right. “X has a far stronger base of political support in the United States than Telegram does,” Chander said. That means “removing X would have likely caused a firestorm of political response against Apple” to a degree it wouldn’t receive for taking down Telegram. It was not a first for Apple, either; the company previously removed Telegram due to a CSAM violation in 2018, for a similarly brief period of time.
One instance of illegal content can be enough to get an app removed from app stores, but Apple appears to have taken a very different approach when it came to X’s latest controversy. Late last year, X rolled out an update giving users the ability to edit images on the platform using X’s Grok AI chatbot. Soon after, AI-generated deepfakes that undressed adults and children began spreading across the platform.
The response to the incident was loud and reverberated across the globe; the UK’s former prime minister condemned X and advanced a deepfake law, while the European Union opened an investigation into the platform. Advocacy groups also called for the removal of X from Apple and Google’s app stores, but that never happened. It sparked legal battles as well, with Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children, suing X for allowing Grok to generate nonconsensual, sexualized images of her. A group of teens also sued xAI — the Musk-owned company in charge of Grok — over accusations that its chatbot generated sexualized images of themselves as minors.
Despite all of the pressure on Apple, the company kept X in its store. Instead, it began communicating with X behind the scenes to request changes.
Apple reached out to the teams behind the X and Grok apps “after it received complaints and saw news coverage of the scandal,” according to a letter Apple wrote to US senators seen by NBC News. Apple asked the developers to “create a plan to improve content moderation,” NBC News reports. While Apple later found that X “substantially resolved its violations,” Apple reportedly told Grok’s team that they needed to make additional changes “or the app could be removed from the App Store.”
Musk issued a statement in January, saying: “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.” xAI later sued a man for allegedly using Grok to generate and distribute CSAM. During this period, Apple removed neither X nor Grok and never has, even though the AI chatbot within both apps generated undressed images of minors.
”Removing X would have had to be a decision made at the very top, a decision that you’re willing to suffer the political consequences, including a very irate Elon Musk,” Chander said. Apple is certainly aware of what can happen. In 2022, shortly after he bought Twitter, Musk began publicly complaining that Apple was trying to restrict the app; the dispute ended with Tim Cook giving Musk a tour of Apple’s campus and resolving the apparent “misunderstanding.”
Meanwhile, Durov claims that Apple removed Telegram before ever contacting the company. Apple declined to comment on the moderation differences between the two apps.
Apple closely guards the process behind its moderation decisions, so it’s hard to tell exactly how the company works with developers behind closed doors. But Apple’s recent actions suggest the rules have some flexibility — at least when the world’s first trillionaire is involved.
