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So what is your opinion? Are you worried?
KEVIN Honestly, not really?
It is obviously not great for public safety that neo-Nazis, far-right militias and other dangerous groups find ways to communicate and organize, and that these ways increasingly involve encryption of end to end. We’ve seen this happen for years, going back to Daesh, and it certainly makes it more difficult for law enforcement and counterterrorism officials.
At the same time, there is a real benefit to moving these extremists away from mainstream platforms, where they can find new supporters and take advantage of the dissemination mechanisms of these platforms to spread their messages to millions of people. potential extremists.
The way I thought of it is in sort of an epidemiological model. If someone is sick and is at risk of infecting others, you ideally want to remove them from the general population and quarantine them, even if it means placing them in a place like a hospital, where there are many others. sick people.
That’s a pretty bad metaphor, but you know what I mean. We know that when they’re on big mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, extremists don’t just talk to each other. They are recruiting. They join completely independent groups and try to sow conspiracy theories there. Somehow I’d rather have 1000 hardened neo-Nazis do bad things together on an encrypted chat app than have them infiltrate 1000 different local Dogspotting groups or whatever.
BRIAN I see where you’re going with this!
When you open Facebook or Twitter, the first thing you see is your timeline, a general feed that includes your friends’ posts. But you can also see posts from strangers if your friends forwarded them or liked them.
When you open Signal or Telegram, you see a list of the conversations you have with individuals or groups of people. To receive a message from someone you don’t know, that person must know your phone number to contact you.
So to complete our analogy, Facebook and Twitter are basically billions of people crammed into one huge auditorium. Encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram are like tall buildings with millions of people, but each person lives in a private room. People have to knock on each other’s doors to send messages, so spreading disinformation would take more effort. In contrast, on Facebook and Twitter, misinformation can go viral in seconds, as the people in that auditorium can all hear what everyone else is shouting.
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