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The Telegram messaging app was up and running in Brazil on Saturday after a federal judge revised an earlier ruling suspending it over the company’s failure to hand over data on neo-Nazi activity.
But in lifting the suspension, the judge kept in place a daily fine of $1 million reais (about $200,000) for Telegram’s refusal to provide the data, according to a press statement provided by the federal court that issued the ruling.
Complete suspension “is not reasonable, considering the wide affectation throughout the national territory of the freedom of communication of thousands of people who are absolutely strangers to the facts under investigation,” judge Flávio Lucas was quoted as saying in the statement.
Telegram had been temporarily suspended in the context of a police inquiry into school shootings in November, when a former student armed with a semiautomatic pistol and wearing a bulletproof vest fatally shot three people and wounded 13 after barging into two schools in the small town of Aracruz in Espirito Santo state.
The 16-year-old is believed to have been a member of extremist groups on Telegram, where tutorials on murder and the manufacture of bombs were disseminated, the court’s statement said.
The Federal Police ordered Telegram to provide details on names, tax identity numbers, profile photos, bank information and registered credit cards, among other things.
