For roughly an hour this week, Telegram vanished from the App Store. Then it was back. Apple later confirmed it had removed the app over child sexual abuse material and reinstated it once the content was taken down.
Sixty minutes is barely anything. But for that stretch, an app with more than 1 billion users — including people in countries where it’s one of the few dependable ways to talk around censorship — simply wasn’t available on iPhone.
Which raised an immediate question: why did X never get the same treatment?
The same rulebook, two very different outcomes
Toward the end of last year, X rolled out an update that let users edit images using Grok, the AI chatbot built into the app. The result was a wave of AI-generated deepfakes stripping the clothes off adults and children, circulating across the platform.
X was never delisted. It’s still on the store today.
On paper, Apple’s own standard is severe enough that one piece of illegal content is grounds for removal. Telegram found that out firsthand — twice, actually. Apple also briefly pulled it over a CSAM violation back in 2018.
The rule is real, then. It just doesn’t appear to apply evenly.
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 is direct about the source of that blowback. “X has a far stronger base of political support in the United States than Telegram does,” he said. Yanking it “would have likely caused a firestorm of political response against Apple” — the sort of reaction a Telegram takedown never produces.
He also has a view on where such a decision would land. “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, not long after his Twitter acquisition, Musk began publicly accusing Apple of trying to restrict the app. It wrapped up with Tim Cook giving Musk a tour of Apple’s campus and resolving what was described as a “misunderstanding.”
Telegram is a genuinely messy platform, and that matters
Nobody is casting Telegram as an innocent bystander here. The Dubai-headquartered app spent years cultivating a reputation for keeping its hands off moderation, and governments have been leaning on it for some time.
Back in 2017, it began stripping out “terrorist-related content” after Indonesia threatened action. Germany considered an outright ban in 2022 over allegations the app enabled hate speech. Then in 2024, French authorities arrested founder and CEO Pavel Durov — the Russian-born executive faced accusations of “complicity” in illegal actions linked to illegal transactions and CSAM. As of last year, France’s investigation into Durov was still open.
Last month, Russia charged Durov with facilitating terrorism, claiming he permits Ukrainian spies to use Telegram to plan attacks. Durov answered with a photo of himself giving the camera the middle finger.
Telegram has since tightened things up: it revised its position on moderating private messages, retired several “misused” features — among them the tool for finding and messaging nearby users — began honoring court orders for data on users suspected of crimes, and ramped up its detection of illegal material.
Large, consequential, and without political allies. That mix explains everything.
What Apple did instead with X
Apple wasn’t facing quiet pressure over the Grok deepfakes. The UK’s former prime minister denounced X and advanced a deepfake law. The European Union launched an investigation. Advocacy organizations urged both Apple and Google to drop the app.
Litigation stacked up as well. Ashley St. Clair, mother of one of Musk’s children, sued X over Grok generating nonconsensual sexualized images of her. Separately, a group of teenagers sued xAI — Musk’s company behind Grok — alleging the chatbot produced sexualized images of them while they were minors.
Apple chose to deal with it out of view. According to a letter Apple sent to US senators that NBC News reviewed, the company reached out to the X and Grok teams “after it received complaints and saw news coverage of the scandal.” Per NBC News, Apple instructed the developers to “create a plan to improve content moderation.”
Apple eventually concluded that X had “substantially resolved its violations.” Grok’s team, meanwhile, was reportedly informed that more work was required “or the app could be removed from the App Store.”
In January, Musk issued a statement: “Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.” xAI went on to sue a man it accused of using Grok to create and distribute CSAM.
Neither app came down. Not X, not Grok — even though the chatbot embedded in both was generating undressed images of minors.
A phone call Telegram says it never got
One detail turns the contrast into something concrete. Durov says Apple delisted Telegram without reaching out to the company first.
X received a discussion and a remediation plan. Telegram was removed first.
Apple wouldn’t comment on the moderation gap between the two apps, in keeping with how closely it protects the workings of these calls. What gets said to developers behind closed doors stays there, and Apple likes that arrangement.
The outcomes, though, are visible — and they form a pattern. There’s flexibility built into the App Store rules, and that flexibility surfaces when the person on the other end of the line is the world’s first trillionaire.