The application Telegramwhose services have been suspended since Wednesday in Brazil for refusal to provide data on neo-Nazi groups which has spread hate messages, said on Thursday it would appeal the measure, considering the requested data impossible to obtain.

The app also said that, as has happened in the past in China, Iran and Russia, it can leave Brazil if local laws threaten its mission to promote freedom of communication. or impose technologically unfeasible demands on it.

“In Brazil, a court asked us for data that was technologically impossible to obtain. We appealed the decision and awaited a final decision,” Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov said in a message he posted on his social media account. network .

The executive added that “regardless of the cost, we will defend our users in Brazil and their right to private communication.”

The messaging app stopped working Wednesday night in Brazil after an Espirito Santo state court ordered a “temporary” suspension of services for its refusal to cooperate in a criminal investigation.

The same court imposed a hefty fine for every day Telegram delays handing over the data of users spreading hate speech to authorities, which, according to authorities, has fueled a wave of violence in schools across the country.

The Minister of Justice, Flávio Dino, said that the government itself requested the judicial measure because the company did not provide the authorities with the data of users who maintain clearly “Nazi and neo-Nazi” profiles.

How did they request the information?

According to the minister, the data was requested as part of a process investigating “the violence that has been unleashed against children and adolescents” in Brazil.

He then alluded to a wave of attacks and threats against schools that began earlier this year and which has already caused incidents in educational centers in several cities, the most serious of which was in Blumenau, where a 25-year-old man stormed a daycare center and killed four children and injured five others.

Durov said Telegram didn’t provide the data due to the technological impossibility of obtaining them and said that the application values ​​its principles of freedom more than the possibility of operating in a market the size of Brazil.

“In cases where local laws contradict our mission or impose unfeasible technological requirements, we sometimes have to leave those markets. In the past, countries like China, Iran and Russia have banned Telegram due to our principled stance on respecting human rights Such facts, even unfortunate ones, are preferable to having to betray our users or the ideas on which we were founded,” he added.