"How has a peaceful European country ended up the gun murder capital of the EU?" "Things got so bad that the government called in the army to help the police. And there's a new deadly trend emerging in this battle. Gang members as young as 14 are increasingly using explosives to target rivals as they fight over drug turfs. "

things tend to be relative, hence statistics are a thing. The gun murder capital of Europe without some hard data as to what that means sounds a bit like the radiation poisoning center of Antarctica, gang members as young as 14 can definitely be increasingly doing things if before they started increasing there were zero gang members below 14 using explosives etc.

Another problem is just taking what the police say as being "true", for example the police say there are 62000 people in Stockholm (a city of slightly over 920000) "linked" to criminal gangs - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-has-around-62000... this article uses the word linked twice, in the title linked to criminal gangs, and later in the article "the authorities have struggled for years to contain violence linked to organised crime." I wonder if they have 62000 people who are violent in their linkage, somehow I doubt it but this seems to be the impression.

Hey, I bet there is a problem, how big of a problem, probably not as big as these news stories imply. Why not? Well because if I had a really big nasty problem I wouldn't just imply it, I would lay it out, plenty of engagement to go around, but if my engagement could benefit from exaggerating the problem then I will imply instead of stating plainly.

At any rate more than 6% of the population of Stockholm is currently not involved in a violent gang war which one might infer from the reportage.

If you are not an inmate I will assume that you are a free person living in a western society. Since you are free person you a free to go and live in Stockholm, lets just say for the statistics you are going to live in a slightly not so friendly neighbourhood where the lying police said that it is an area populated with predominantly 14 years old gang members, now since police by your own words cannot be trusted we will assume that their information is not correct and the area is perfectly fine and safe.

Please run the maths and tell me with just 5% probability to get executed by a 14 years old gang member by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times how likely is this event to occur? Of course the question that follow is are you going to take that chance ? I already know the answer.

Now you can choose to deny reality and look away, but the good thing about reality is, that it is just like gravity it just hits you sometimes.

I don't know if your PM have to call in the army to help with gang related crimes the situation seem pretty bad to me, again you are free to prove me wrong statistically, and take your chances.

I know we're supposed to think everybody is being honest here, but I don't think you do love responses like this.

>Well there is only one way to find out statistically since you love statistics.

right, to get the rates of deaths by violence, rates of death by gang related violence, compare that to other parts of the world with gang related violence etc. etc. I mean I agree, everybody knows how to do statistics!

>Since you are free person you a free to go and live in Stockholm,

I stand corrected, not everybody knows how to do statistics.

>again you are free to prove me wrong statistically, and take your chances.

but anyway that is not how statistics works.

>Of course the question that follow is are you going to take that chance ? I already know the answer.

You know the answer as to whether I am willing to move to a part of Stockholm the police identify as high crime from "a western society" based on a hacker news argument with someone who evidently doesn't know how statistics work?

Amazing!!

>Please run the maths and tell me with just 5% probability to get executed by a 14 years old gang member by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times how likely is this event to occur?

If "with just 5% probability to get executed" then the answer to "how likely is this event to occur?" is 5%. However as this is "by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times" then that would mean 5 out of every 100 times somebody walks home they get executed.

Given the earlier number of people in the article linked with crime was 62000, and assuming that everybody walks home at least once per day and 5% of people walking home get executed by 14 year olds it follows that in your world 3100 people per day are getting executed by 14 year olds in Stockholm, that seems a lot. I mean in 30 days that would be more than the number of people linked with crime!

If that were true I don't think the EU would just be proposing to help inmates in their prisons but might be sending peace keeping forces in to help.

Which is hilarious because it also says there are 62000 gang linked people in Stockholm.

One thing you are always told to watch out for is big round numbers in stats, because it is pretty unlikely it is just 62000 and not 62119 or something (not a big stats guy, just something I've read)

At any rate the article says 62000 linked to gangs, and 62 killings (pretty weird that). So a 0.1% violence among the linked to gangs people (if all the murders were linked to gangs), but out of the full pop of Sweden 10,490,000 this is a 0.000591% rate of murder, the U.S as a whole has 0.0075 murder rate right now.

Zoom in on parts of the U.S you get a much higher murder rate - https://usafacts.org/articles/which-cities-have-the-highest-...

like I said everything is relative, and Sweden does not have as big a problem as the reporting lets on.

And take it from someone who actually lives in the area (as opposed to HN speculators): YES it has gotten significantly worse over the last five years (having already been bad for decades), and YES 14 year old hitmen with explosives and automatic weapons are now an actual thing, not just a couple of incidents.

The politics of this is so inflamed, which makes it harder to discuss, much less solve the problems. I am not against immigration per se, from any given country. But right now, it is obviously causing major problems that need to be handled with extreme prejudice.

At least in Australia and in the UK. Maybe they're a moderate and balanced presenter of truth on the ground in Sweden.

Seems unlikely.

I'm fully aware this reads as "attacking the source" but there's no rabid attack intended here just a frank pragmatic assessment of what "Sky News Investigates" actually means.

You speak to people in Sweden and they tell you about the crime and rapes happening.

It's a bizarre lie, not the least because it so obviously does not hold up to even the most basic scrutiny.

I think that facts are facts. There are no facts that are not worth knowing. Banning collecting statistics is a sure way to make sure you are blind and ignorant and reality will smack you hard until you wake up. The young teenagers throwing bombs and executing people on the street is that reality.

A tip is that whenever you reach a ludicrous conclusion "they do nothing to stop underage violence", it's probably your analysis that is ludicrous and not the object being analyzed.

Yes, the police and social services has compiled written information that they want to share with parents of at-risk children.

This seems a strange thing to ridicule.

The main issue being "an encrypted messenger". So whatsapp=gang… unclear if telegram is ok since it's normally not e2ee.

I am skeptical this will achieve anything useful.

> Telegram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong, Belarus, Kazakhstan, even in Barcelona back in the day. It's been a tool for the opposition to a large extent. But it doesn't really matter whether it's opposition or the ruling party that is using Telegram. For us, we apply the rules equally to all sides. We don't become prejudiced in this way.

> It's not that we are rooting for the opposition or we are rooting for the ruling party. It's not that we don't care, but we think it's important to have this platform that is neutral to all voices because we believe that the competition of different ideas can result in progress and a better world for everyone.. You don't want to be geopolitically aligned. You don't want to select the winners in any of these political fights.

He'd have you believe that all messages are welcome on Telegram, that no material is censored, that it's all about free expression, that they're too small to provide moderation.

But when an account is flagged for spam, Telegram rapidly responds and restricts or kills the account. So they can and do moderate content.

It's just that accounts can get flagged for CSAM hundreds of times and Telegram takes no action.

They're making a choice to provide a platform for this material. That's against the law and prison time is absolutely justified.

https://restoreprivacy.com/telegram-sharing-user-data/

> the operators of the messenger app Telegram have released user data to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in several cases. According to SPIEGEL information, this was data from suspects in the areas of child abuse and terrorism. In the case of violations of other criminal offenses, it is still difficult for German investigators to obtain information from Telegram, according to security circles.

Signal and Telegram were publicly sparring in May 2024, https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/chat-apps-government-ties-a...

> two popular chat services have accused each other of having undisclosed government ties. According to Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Telegram is not only “notoriously insecure” but also “routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov, on the other hand, claims that “the US government spent $3 million to build Signal’s encryption” and Signal’s current leaders are “activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”

"other offences" probably means copyright issues?

sounds logical and can probably be checked!

>"routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.”

sounds logical and being a big company I suppose true.

>“the US government spent $3 million to build Signal’s encryption”

sounds probable, meaning they got funding from some NSA project.

>“activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”

this sounds a bit crazy!

In my experience it's the channel's admins who respond, not Telegram's.

If that's the case then CSAM not getting actioned is probably just channel admins allowing content that they approve of.

I suspect that Telegram could put significantly more effort into CSAM suppression and enforcement, but I seriously doubt this is really what's up with the French arrest of Durov.