Credit: Christ Ratcliffe /Ratcliffe/ Bloomberg
Donald Trump’s removal from Facebook and Twitter is fuelling a surge in the use of rival service Telegram, with the messaging app experiencing a 500pc rise in users over the past 72 hours.
The explosion in the use of Telegram has prompted fears that right-wing extremists are embracing the platform, which uses sophisticated encryption and in the past has been linked to use by Islamic extremist groups, in growing numbers.
Multiple Neo-Nazi and extreme right groups could be found operating on Telegram on Wednesday. They include the Nationalist Social Club 131, with more than 2,000 subscribers and the Boogaloo Intel Group, with more than 7,000 subscribers.
"There has been a major influx of Trump supporters to far-right groups on Telegram," said Jakob Guhl, research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. "For example, the channels of the Proud Boys or of the far-right influencer Nicholas Fuentes, which had some 16,000 followers on January 6, now have nearly 30,000 followers [each]."
Although researchers said Telegram did remove some objectionable content on Tuesday night, at the time of writing the Telegraph was still able to find images of swastikas and slurs against Jewish people.
In response to content being removed, users were rushing to share private channels, where members would be vetted.
"Telegram has very limited content-moderation policies, with really only three lines banning the promotion of violence on public channels, spam and the sharing of illegal pornographic material," Guhl added.
Posts from January 6, the day of the Washington D.C. riots, were also still visible on public pages, including content that called on followers to kill police and "burn down the Capital [sic] building".
On the same channels, videos showing protesters in Washington D.C. chanting "hang Mike Pence", referring to the vice President, were still available.
Telegram did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov in August 2017
Credit: Tatan Syuflana/AP
"The amount of content on Telegram posted by these groups is reminiscent of jihadi activity on Twitter before they were shutdown," says Steve Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, which tracks foreign and domestic terror groups from Washington D.C.
"[Telegram] have been the heart and soul of not only cyber jihad for the past five years, but also now domestic terrorist groups are using it, such as Neo Nazis."
Joe Mulhall, from the British organisation Hope not Hate says there is so much terrorist content on Telegram, the platform has become known in some circles as "the terror-gram".
"These smaller platforms obviously have much laxer moderation. So a platform like Telegram, even though it’s not made by the far right, is just absolutely awash with extreme and often illegal content," he claimed.
The removal of the US President from mainstream platforms has triggered a furious backlash against Facebook and Twitter from Trump supporters, with many eager to find new channels and encrypted messaging apps allowing them to continue to communicate with each other and organise protest activity.
That has sparked concern that Telegram could become a new home for US extremist groups as they are kicked off mainstream networks, echoing a similar pattern witnessed in other countries.
"In other contexts, such as Germany, we’ve really seen platforms like Telegram become really, really central for the far-right in 2020 during COVID," said Guhl, of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
8 million new users
On his Telegram channel, the app’s Russian founder Pavel Durov said Telegram signed up roughly 8 million users per day over the past 72 hours, while last year the app saw daily user sign ups hover at around 1.5 million.
"We’ve had surges of downloads before, throughout our 7-year history of protecting user privacy. But this time is different," he wrote, adding the majority of growth had been in Asia.
Durov listed user growth in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa. Notably missing from the list was North America.
The omission suggests Durov may be keen to play down suggestions that Trump supporters are finding a new home on the app.
However, data from company Sensor Tower notes an uptick in downloads in the US, with the app occupying second place in Apple’s free app download chart all week.
The surge in interest from pro-Trump supporters has also coincided with people looking for new messaging apps after Whatsapp adjusted its privacy policy.
The updated policy — which does not apply to users in the UK or Europe — removed a section on how users could opt out of sharing their WhatsApp data to Facebook, instead reading: "As part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies."
WhatsApp users were told they had to accept the policy or delete their accounts.
Who created Telegram?
Telegram was created by entrepreneur Pavel Durov, who has gained notoriety as a fierce protector of digital privacy at home in Russia for refusing to cave in to Kremlin pressure to allow security services to access users’ encrypted messages.
The 36-year-old chief executive, who only wears black clothes, kept a low profile even as the app became synonymous with anti-government protests and was used around the world to help demonstrators organise online.
Hong Kong democracy protesters used the app last summer to run their decentralised movement, turning to the app’s polling feature to make decisions about whether to return home or continue to protest. It has also been used by advocates for Catalonia Independence from Spain and young Iranians used the app to organise in 2018.
Before Telegram, Durov and his brother Nikolai founded Russia’s most popular social network VKontakte, now known as VK in 2006, earning him the nickname "Russia’s Zuckerberg".
The site became Russia’s main social network, growing to more than 350m users. Durov seemed to enjoy the success, once throwing more than £1,000 worth of money folded into paper planes from the window of his St Petersburg office in 2012.
But VK’s success caused pressure from the Kremlin to shut down pages linked to the opposition or those organising protest marches. Durov responded to government pressure in 2011 by publishing a photograph of a dog in a hoodie sticking out its tongue,
The entrepreneur claimed that armed men dressed in camouflage clothing visited his home after the post, angry that VK’s chief executive was resisting government demands. Eventually he lost control of VK, publishing a public message to investors that included a photograph of him raising his middle finger to the camera.
In 2013, he was implicated in a hit-and-run which some saw as politically motivated. Durov claimed he couldn’t even drive.
He fled days before Russian police raided a VK office, launching Telegram in Berlin that same year. He is currently a citizen of Saint Kitts and Nevis, a Caribbean island. Durov and his employees spent years living in rented Airbnb apartments around the world, with the entrepreneur spending around £700,000 of his personal fortune to fund the project after its launch.
Telegram has grown to have hundreds of millions of users. Durov, wearing his typical uniform of a black jacket and trousers, held a lavish party in Barcelona in 2016 to celebrate reaching 100m users. He hired magician David Blaine to mingle among the crowd during the evening.
However Telegram’s staunchly protective attitude to the privacy of pro-democracy protesters has also appealed to other anti-government groups.
Why has it become so popular now?
Telegram’s previous popularity among extremist groups has sparked concern that the app could be leveraged by white supremacists trying to organise ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20th.
Trump supporters have flocked to fringe social media sites after clashing with content moderation policies on mainstream platforms.
On Tuesday, Twitter announced the platform had removed more than 70,000 accounts found to be spreading the QAnon conspiracy theory and Facebook said it was banning all content containing the phrase “stop the steal”, the rallying cry among those who choose not to believe the election result.
A Telegram group linked to the extremist Boogaloo movement included posts which referred to the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooter, who killed 11 people in 2018, as a "saint" who carried out a "hilarious prank". However others in the group urged members to speak to each other in private channels to avoid journalists and "the feds".
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