Telegram’s content moderation and purported Russia ties under scrutiny

Created as a messaging app a decade ago, Telegram has grown to become a major news platform. In regions including the Middle East and Eastern Europe, it’s a place where people consume news – including from reliable journalistic outlets that are present on the platform and have amassed a large audience. 

In Ukraine, Telegram “became a major news platform thanks to its technical reliability [critical during the war], as well as the quickness and convenience of its one-to-many channels functionality”, The Fix noted earlier this year. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US-government funded news organisation with a long tradition of piercing through autocratic propaganda, runs over 30 Telegram channels to reach audiences in countries like Russia and Iran.

Yet, Telegram has been under scrutiny for issues including harbouring misinformation and hosting far-right groups. In recent weeks, the Israel-Hamas war has brought renewed attention to the platform’s lax content moderation policy that helps spread extremist propaganda, and in Ukraine a public discussion is underway over Telegram’s purported ties to Russia.

The “Telegram-to-Twitter pipeline” of misinformation

The military conflict that started over a week ago following Hamas’ attack against Israel has prompted journalists and disinformation researchers to turn their attention to Telegram.

Channels operated by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are read by hundreds of thousands of people; the two groups “have relied on Telegram as their primary means of communication, broadcasting videos documenting their violent incursion into Israeli territory and the capturing of hostages”, the Atlantic Council’s researchers Dina Sadek and Layla Mashkoor write.

For example, Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, has over 700,000 subscribers as of October 19, and most of its messages are gathering over half a million views, according to Telegram’s own data. Terrorist and extremist organisations are banned on major social platforms like Facebook or X (Twitter), as opposed to Telegram. Thus, “Telegram’s lack of robust moderation serves militant factions seeking to spread propaganda at scale”, Sadek and Mashkoor note. 

Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov acknowledged the concerns and claimed that “Telegram’s moderators and AI tools remove millions of obviously harmful content” every day but said that the platform wouldn’t block channels operated by Hamas, citing their practical utility for journalists and fact-checkers, among other arguments. 

Yet, contrary to Durov’s claim that “it’s unlikely that Telegram channels can be used to significantly amplify propaganda”, researchers have noted the platform’s role as not just a news consumption platform itself, but also as a starting point for extremist propaganda to get spread elsewhere.

Rolling Stone wrote about “the Telegram-to-Twitter pipeline”, where the former app serves “as ground zero of misinformation” amplified in the West on X. In an interview with The New York Times, researcher Kathleen Carley compared fighting misinformation to “playing Whac-a-Mole” unless all major platforms apply content moderation rules consistently.

“The least transparent major tech company”

Tech entrepreneur Yaroslav Azhnyuk has been a prominent critic of Telegram in Ukraine. Earlier this year, he wrote a column for The Kyiv Independent calling for more scrutiny to potential risks of the messaging app to Ukrainians, launching a wider public discussion.

In a conversation with The Fix he says that Telegram is “the least transparent major tech company” and claims there’s “dozens of indirect proofs of Telegram’s cooperation with the Russian government”.

Telegram was launched by Pavel Durov, Russia-born entrepreneur who previously founded Russian social network VK. Durov lost control over VK and left Russia almost a decade ago, soon after founding Telegram. According to the company, he now lives in Dubai and has dual French and Emirati citizenship.

Although Telegram is not based in Russia, Azhnyuk points to its purported Russian ties, such as as “suspect” financing sources. (Azhnyuk says he doesn’t have direct confirmation of Telegram cooperating with the Kremlin, and the company has denied his claims).

Azhnyuk is also critical of Telegram’s security as a messaging app – Telegram’s messages are not end-to-end encrypted by default, meaning that they are stored on the platform’s servers. End-to-end encryption, wherein only the sender and recipient have technical access to the message, can be switched on as a separate feature, but it’s not a default setting, unlike in other major messaging apps like WhatsApp or Signal. Azhnyuk notes that Ukrainian military commanders usually prohibit the use of Telegram among the troops in favour of Signal or other more secure alternatives.

Azhnyuk calls on Ukrainians to quit Telegram. He also urges media outlets to close down their Telegram channels or at least start looking for alternative options in case Telegram’s use is prohibited or marginalised in Ukraine. Both scenarios look far-fetched prospects today, given Telegram’s dominance as both a messaging app and a news consumption platform in the country – but the campaign launched by Azhnyuk has caused a public discussion in Ukraine that draws more scrutiny to Telegram’s drawbacks and the risks associated with the app. 

Editor’s note: this article was updated to reflect that Telegram’s messages are not end-to-end encrypted by default; the previous version incorrectly stated that Telegram’s messages are unencrypted by default.

Source of the cover photo: Ivan Radic for Flickr, CC BY 2.0, link to the material

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