Telegram disappeared from the App Store for about an hour this week. That’s it. One hour, and then it was back, after Apple confirmed it had pulled the app over child sexual abuse material and restored it once the content was gone.
An hour is nothing. But it’s an hour in which an app used by more than 1 billion people, including people in countries where it’s one of the few reliable ways to communicate around censorship, simply wasn't available on iPhone.
And the obvious question followed immediately: where was this energy for X?
The same rulebook, two very different outcomes
Late last year, X shipped an update letting users edit images with Grok, its in-app AI chatbot. What came next was AI-generated deepfakes that undressed adults and children, spreading across the platform.
X stayed in the App Store. It’s still there.
Apple's own standard is strict enough on paper that a single piece of illegal content can get an app pulled. That’s what happened to Telegram. Twice, in fact: Apple removed it over a CSAM violation back in 2018, also briefly.
So the rule exists. It just doesn’t seem to bind everyone the same way.
The reason may not be a technical one
“When you are enforcing your content moderation policy against an entire platform, you are subjecting yourself to the blowback that will happen,” said Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown.
Chander’s read is blunt about where that blowback would come from. “X has a far stronger base of political support in the United States than Telegram does,” he said. Pulling it “would have likely caused a firestorm of political response against Apple” of a kind that taking down Telegram never generates.
He goes further on how such a call would get made. “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 has seen that movie. In 2022, shortly after buying Twitter, Musk started publicly complaining that Apple was trying to restrict the app. The dispute ended with Tim Cook walking Musk around Apple’s campus and clearing up the apparent “misunderstanding.”
Telegram is a genuinely messy platform, and that matters
None of this makes Telegram a sympathetic bystander. The Dubai-headquartered app spent years building a reputation for a hands-off approach to moderation, and governments have been squeezing it for a while.
In 2017 it started removing “terrorist-related content” after threats from Indonesia. Germany weighed banning it outright in 2022 over claims it enabled hate speech. In 2024 French authorities arrested founder and CEO Pavel Durov, the Russian-born executive accused of “complicity” in illegal actions tied to illegal transactions and CSAM. France’s inquiry into Durov remains open as of last year.
Last month Russia charged Durov with facilitating terrorism, alleging he lets Ukrainian spies use Telegram to plan attacks. Durov’s response was a photo of himself flipping off the camera.
The company has tightened up since: it changed its stance on private message moderation, killed off some “misused” features including the one that let users find and message people nearby, started complying with court orders for information on users suspected of criminal activity and stepped up detection of illegal material.
Big, important, and politically friendless. That combination is the whole story.
What Apple did instead with X
The pressure on Apple over the Grok deepfakes wasn’t quiet. The UK’s former prime minister condemned X and pushed forward a deepfake law. The European Union opened an investigation. Advocacy groups called on Apple and Google to pull the app from their stores.
The lawsuits piled up too. Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children, sued X for allowing Grok to generate nonconsensual sexualized images of her. A group of teens sued xAI, the Musk-owned company behind Grok, over accusations the chatbot generated sexualized images of them as minors.
Apple’s answer was to handle it privately. The company contacted 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.
Apple later determined X had “substantially resolved its violations.” Grok’s team was reportedly told it needed further changes “or the app could be removed from the App Store.”
Musk put out a statement in January: “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.” xAI subsequently sued a man for allegedly using Grok to generate and distribute CSAM.
Neither app was ever removed. Not X, not Grok, despite the chatbot inside both producing undressed images of minors.
A phone call Telegram says it never got
Here’s the detail that sharpens the contrast into something you can actually measure. Durov claims Apple removed Telegram before ever contacting the company.
X got a conversation and a plan. Telegram got delisted first.
Apple declined to comment on the moderation differences between the two apps, which is consistent with how tightly it guards the mechanics of these decisions. We don’t get to see what’s said to developers behind closed doors, and Apple prefers it that way.
What we can see is the pattern in the outcomes. The App Store rules have give in them, and the give shows up when the world’s first trillionaire is on the other end of the call.
