Soon after the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, a warning that was viewed more than 85,000 times started circulating among Germany’s far right: “Back up your Telegram data as quickly as you can and clean your account.”
The message came from Kim Dotcom, the embattled German founder of the now-defunct digital piracy website Megaupload who is set to be extradited from New Zealand, and who knows a thing or two about facing penalties for illegal activity on the internet.
Telegram users may have reason to fear after French authorities threw the book at Durov, charging him with complicity in crimes that take place on the app, including the sharing of child pornography and the trading of narcotics. If Durov can be held liable for crimes on the app, so too can the criminals perpetrating them, the logic goes.
Researchers at Germany’s Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS) track around 3,000 channels and 2,000 groups linked to the German far right and conspiracy movements. Users are known to post racist and antisemitic hate speech, and some groups contain Nazi symbols, Holocaust denial, and calls to violence, openly flouting Germany’s strict criminal code. But a mass exodus from the platform, where groups have spent the past five years building a global infrastructure for radicalization and offline demonstrations, would be tantamount to starting from scratch online.
“If you’re a terrorist or you’re an extremist, you’re going to follow the path of least resistance, and in this particular case, that probably means Telegram,” Adam Hadley, the founder and executive director of the United Nations–backed organization Tech Against Terrorism, tells WIRED.
Durov’s arrest is a shot across the bow for Telegram, which now suddenly finds itself in the sights of European law enforcement and regulators. Neo-Nazis’ favorite app is staring down an existential threat, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it.
A ‘Bridge Technology’
Alarm spread quickly the Saturday of Durov’s arrest. Just 90 minutes after French media reported that Durov’s private jet had been intercepted by authorities at Paris’ Le Bourget Airport, a far-right channel posted that his arrest “may have political reasons and be a tool to gain access to personal data of Telegram users.”
The channel is associated with the Reichsbürger movement, which believes Germany is not a sovereign state and is still occupied by Allied powers. German police thwarted their coup plot in 2022, discovering a cache of more than $500,000 in gold and cash, as well as hundreds of guns, knives, ballistic helmets, and ammunition rounds.
Similar messages began proliferating across the app. That night, Austrian extremist Martin Sellner wrote—the translation here is via Google’s translation tool—that “the ‘liberal West’ is switching off the democracy simulation. All communication channels may soon collapse. Will Musk be arrested next?” The message was viewed more than 40,000 times as estimated by TGStat, a Telegram analytics tool, which provided the view counts cited in this story.
Sellner was banned from entering Germany in March for being the keynote speaker at the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party’s ill-famed November Potsdam conference. There, he presented a plan to members of Germany’s surging far-right party on conducting mass deportations once it came into power. AfD emerged victorious Sunday in a state election in eastern Germany, granting the far right a historic first since World War II.
The messages became more specific with each passing hour. The afternoon after Durov’s arrest, the far-right Austrian radio broadcaster AUF1 instructed users to “regularly delete chats with friends” in a post viewed nearly 150,000 times. And by the evening, the admin of an anti-lockdown channel was wondering aloud whether it was time to “use the transition period to create decentralized structures,” and recommending new encrypted messaging apps.
“In 2020, our big advantage was our speed and how many people switched and installed Telegram,” the poster wrote in German. “Since 2021, many have been switching back to the old platforms like WhatsApp and YouTube because now the censorship is ‘not so bad anymore.’ That’s a fallacy. With IT systems, any censorship can be reactivated at any time. I see Telegram and X as bridging technologies that help us to remain capable of action during this time. But we shouldn’t be under the illusion that they are permanently available to us.”
The message came from the flagship channel of the Querdenken movement, which began as a local protest movement and soon became a countrywide phenomenon, frequented by far-right provocateurs and often marked by violence. But the very tools that made them successful in mobilizing conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers to the streets are the same ones that now make it difficult to leave.
An Unlikely Breakup
Telegram has become indispensable to the far right. Despite the hand-wringing, most extremism experts don’t expect them to go anywhere, barring a wholesale shutdown of the app. There are several reasons for this. While Telegram may call itself a “messaging app with a focus on speed and security,” it often functions more like a platform. Users can create massive multiadmin groups with up to 200,000 members. Channels can be unlimited in size.
Combine that with the fact that these groups and channels enjoy near untouchability, unlike on most other major social media platforms, and it makes an irresistible cocktail for spreading information and disinformation far and wide. In comparison to the sprawling terms of service that competitors like Meta have, Telegram’s German “terms of use” come out to a whopping 100 words (three of which are “terms,” “of,” and “use”).
That’s been part of Durov’s MO for Telegram since day one. Durov created the app after skyrocketing to tech stardom as the founder of VKontakte, or VK, a Russian clone of Facebook. But when the Kremlin began pressuring Durov to share VK user data with the Federal Security Service, he fled the country, cashed out of the app, and founded Telegram, promising never to hand over user data to governments. The company brags on its FAQ page: “To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.”
Telegram’s reputation attracted the far right in droves around 2019, following a spate of blocks and bans from Facebook and what was then known as Twitter. “They want to spread these messages without any content moderation happening,” Jan Penfrat, senior policy adviser at European Digital Rights, a network of European NGOs, tells WIRED. “They want to be able to spread content that might be illegal under German law or might be otherwise removed on other platforms due to infringements of the terms of service of those platforms. And they can do that on Telegram.”
Telegram also advertises itself as one of the most secure and private apps on the market, drawing people who may want to use it for illicit activities. Security experts say that’s mostly good PR. The only text that’s encrypted on the app is for one-to-one messages, making it no more secure than Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or iMessage. And users need to opt into encryption, unlike with competitors.
Most activity taking place on the app is not protected; governments, researchers, and journalists can peep inside public channels anytime. That’s largely the point: “Privacy really mostly is a marketing term, because what the far right uses the app for is not encrypted,” Kilian Bühling, a researcher at Germany’s Weizenbaum Institute who studies antidemocratic groups online, tells WIRED. “The image of being privacy-friendly somehow diffuses to those other functionalities [which] are not encrypted at all,” he added.
Even for the small portion of content on the app that is encrypted, security experts say the locks are not all that strong. “The encryption protocol that Telegram employs isn’t even particularly secure,” says Penfrat. “Most cryptographers will tell you that the homegrown, self-built encryption protocol that Telegram uses has a number of problems that make it largely inferior to other protocols like Signal.”
Leaving an app that welcomes controversial users with open arms, advertises privacy (falsely or otherwise), and offers functionality that’s perfect for radicalization and information-sharing is a tough sell. That process is something extremism experts call “adversarial shift,” like when Telegram uncharacteristically worked with Europol to remove ISIS accounts, causing them to flood to a Canadian messaging app called Hoop.
“They would struggle to find a one-to-one replacement for Telegram,” Hadley said. “They may split the different use cases between different apps—that may be the most likely scenario. So they might try to use Facebook more for something and maybe Signal for something else. But Telegram, effectively, is a super app that does all of these things in one place.”
Telegram’s Future
What happens next could shape the future of how democracies confront illegal and extremist content online. But the fallout is anyone’s guess.
The French criminal case is unlikely to have any direct effect on the German far right, considering the charges don’t focus on extremism or calls to violence. However, the aggressive step from French authorities could embolden other countries to take similar steps. “Maybe a dam is broken that people realize, ‘Oh, you can actually touch Durov, it’s actually okay to indict him for breaking the law,’” Miro Dittrich, a right-wing extremism researcher and co-CEO at CeMAS, tells WIRED.
Other countries have tried to leverage their legal and justice systems against Durov with mixed results. Germany couldn’t find a physical address to send complaints to, so its justice ministry levied fines totaling $5 million against Telegram in 2022 for failing to let users report illegal content and to name a legal representative. The company challenged these; procedures are still ongoing. The Brazilian Supreme Court tried to shut down the app twice, first for failing to take down a prominent user spreading fake news and again in 2023, after Durov ignored requests to provide info on neo-Nazi users. The first ban lasted only two days, because Durov claimed the Brazilian Supreme Court was emailing the wrong address. The second was lifted after four days, when Durov appealed, saying the request was “technologically impossible.”
National shutdowns are only so effective. “Telegram can withstand all this,” Hadley said. “Not once has it been successfully shut down. VPNs are ubiquitous. I think really short of arresting the entire engineering team, I’m not really sure what can be done about it.”
The real threat to Telegram’s nearly nonexistent content moderation is the European Union’s new landmark disinformation and hate speech law, the Digital Services Act. It allows regulators to fine platforms up to 6 percent of their global revenue if they refuse to take down the sale of illegal products, fake news, or hate speech. “The DSA can really bleed you dry, and so it may be that financially, the DSA is the ultimate ruin,” Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University, tells WIRED.
There’s a hitch, though. The DSA’s strict enforcement mechanisms kick in only for so-called “very large online platforms,” or VLOPs, with 45 million users in the EU. Telegram claims it has 41 million; the EU isn’t buying it. “If we think that they haven’t been providing accurate user data, we can unilaterally designate them [as a very large platform] on the basis of our own investigation,” Thomas Regnier, the European Commission spokesperson for digital issues, told the Financial Times, who first reported on the EU investigation.
Without VLOP designation, there’s not so much the EU can do. Earlier this year, Belgium was chosen to oversee Telegram’s compliance with the DSA, as national regulators are responsible for the smaller platforms. “It would still be one national regulator going up against this very big, even though not officially, VLOP company,” Julian Jaursch, a tech regulation policy expert at the German think tank Interface, tells WIRED. “And that was the whole point of the DSA, to have a bit of a counterweight, to have the whole EU market and the size of the commission against some of these other companies that are operating globally and have a lot of financial resources and legal resources.”
There’s a possibility the legal and regulatory pressures grow too large and Telegram makes some adjustments to its come-one-come-all approach. There are already signs the app is prepared for such a contingency. Eagle-eyed source code watchers noticed in May that Telegram rolled out a new fact-check feature in beta. “If they suddenly get told, ‘You need to do more to make sure that there’s not disinformation on the platform,’ they can just flick the switch and then have the fact-check stuff come in,” Jordan Wildon, a digital extremism investigator and founder of open source intelligence agency Prose Intelligence, tells WIRED. “So I think we’re going to start seeing some changes in how Telegram works.”
“We have to see how this all plays out,” Chander said. “[It’s] very hard to predict right now whether or not the far-right users abandon the app or the app abandons them.”
Correction: 9/4/2024, 11:24 am EST: This story was corrected to accurately describe how Belgium assumed a regulatory role.
