Telegram: the new favorite messaging and social media app for extremists



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There are a lot of things right-wing extremists love about Telegram, the social media and messaging app that currently tops app stores. Its moderation of content is lax and dispersed. It is a well-designed app with plenty of features for mass communication as well as encrypted chats and file sharing. And Telegram has more users than ever.

Following the Capitol uprising, Telegram announced that it had surpassed 500 million active users worldwide. It had added 25 million new users in just 72 hours. Only 2% of the Dubai-based app’s user base is in the United States, but it is becoming increasingly popular among Americans. Telegram’s U.S. downloads in the first weeks of this year were more than 700% higher than they were for the same period in 2020, according to data from app measurement firm Sensor Tower.

The use of alternative messaging apps has exploded in recent weeks for a variety of reasons, including the fallout from a WhatsApp privacy update and a crackdown by other platforms after the Capitol Riot. In the United States, Signal, known for its end-to-end encrypted messaging, had the same number of unique installs in the first 18 days of 2021 as it did for all of 2020.

Telegram is currently the most downloaded app on the Google Play Store, having eliminated Signal for the top spot in the United States. However, Telegram’s specific combination of features makes it particularly popular among American right-wing extremists, who have joined the platform in droves after being kicked out of Twitter, Facebook and Talk. The latter is another extremist favorite and has recently been launched on the internet, although it is now back in very limited form.

Telegram has three main components. Channels, both public and private, are mostly one-way shows that an unlimited number of people can watch.

Telegram also has public and private groups where up to 200,000 people can communicate. Groups on Signal, for comparison, caps at 1,000; WhatsApp to 256. After its role in amplifying violence in India and Myanmar, Facebook-owned WhatsApp has limited the ability of groups to forward messages to other groups in order to stop the spread of disinformation. Larger groups allow false information – and calls for violence – to spread faster.

The third component of Telegram is called Secret Chats, where people can have end-to-end encrypted one-on-one conversations, meaning hackers or the police couldn’t see the content of those messages.

Megan Squire, professor of computer science at Elon University and member of the Southern Poverty Law Center who studies extremism online, says that together these social media and messaging features are “handy” for extremists in line.

“They can do radicalization and recruiting on one platform,” Squire told Recode. These characteristics also make him popular around the world among activists. The app has been used by protest movements (Hong Kong) as well as by extremists (Islamic State).

Last week, marking a rare departure from its much more practical approach to American extremists, Telegram blocked dozens of public channels for inciting violence, claiming they violated terms of service. This included a channel that, in the days leading up to the inauguration, showed how to make and conceal homemade weapons and bombs. This week, the app’s founder, Russian tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov, said after seeing an increase in reports in the United States, he had deleted “hundreds” of calls for violence on the channels. public.

Many channels and public groups containing hate speech, conspiracy theories and racist memes remain. There are currently two channels with Proud Boys in the name, each with almost 40,000 subscribers. They’ve accumulated a lot of that in recent weeks.

On Sunday, the nonprofit Coalition for a Safer Web filed a long-standing lawsuit against Apple asking to start Telegram from its App Store – as Apple did with Speak – citing its failure to remove violent content and app extremist.

A Telegram spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

There is reason to believe that Telegram does not treat content moderation as seriously as other platforms. Squire said she reported a manifesto about the murder of Muslims to Telegram almost two years ago, and it is still relevant today. Last week, a Proud Boy posted Squire’s address on the site. She reported it, but doxing isn’t one of the five categories of inappropriate content you can report, and again, no one responded to her. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, there is no way to follow a report on Telegram and find out what happened to it.

But the lax moderation of the social media messaging app is also one of the many reasons for its popularity among extremists. Telegram, unlike other platforms, also allows file storage, which Squire says is attractive to extremists who want to share radicalized videos and manifestos. Notably, Telegram’s very brief terms of service prohibit the promotion of violence on public channels but does not mention anything about promoting violence on private channels or groups.

Telegram is also popular among extremists, precisely for the reasons it is popular with everyone: the app is pretty good. It is easy to use and is not often offline. Squire said it was much better than other apps popular with right-wing extremists like Gab and Parler. “It’s not combined with bubble gum and duct tape,” she says.

As such, a lot of people use it. And communication platforms rely on network effects, which means they become more useful as there are more of them.

And with more extremists turning to Telegram after the crackdown on other platforms, the app’s loose moderation has the potential to create new echo chambers to further radicalize these people. How much Telegram moderates its site will decide what kind of platform it becomes.

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