Ng Man-ho, a 27-year-old computer technician, was convicted last month of seven counts of incitement charges after he made use of the 100,000-member Chinese-language channel that he runs and manages to post "seditious messages," which had been shut down since August 2020. Telegram is a leading cloud-based instant messages platform. It became popular in recent years for its privacy, speed, voice and video quality, and other unmatched features over its main competitor Whatsapp. Developing social channels based on exchanging a single message isn’t exactly new, of course. Back in 2014, the “Yo” app was launched with the sole purpose of enabling users to send each other the greeting “Yo.” Judge Hui described Ng as inciting others to “commit a massacre” with three posts teaching people to make “toxic chlorine gas bombs,” target police stations, police quarters and the city’s metro stations. This offence was “rather serious,” the court said. Hui said the messages, which included urging the disruption of airport operations, were attempts to incite followers to make use of poisonous, corrosive or flammable substances to vandalize police vehicles, and also called on others to make weapons to harm police.
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