Why Telegram Matters
Why Telegram Matters
Telegram, content moderation, and the de-globalized web
Last week, the founder of Telegram was arrested in France. Reuters:
Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire founder and owner of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at Le Bourget airport outside Paris shortly after landing on a private jet late on Saturday and placed in custody, three sources told Reuters…
Durov, who has dual French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was arrested as part of a preliminary police investigation into allegedly allowing a wide range of crimes due to a lack of moderators on Telegram and a lack of cooperation with police, a French police source said…
The encrypted application, with close to 1 billion users, is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. It is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and WeChat.
Telegram is one of the most important social media platforms in the world, but it’s also not very well known in the US because Telegram’s userbase tilts international and non-Western. Telegram is also at the intersection of a lot of developing online currents, especially ones that I like to highlight here at Infinite Scroll. Because Durov’s arrest has given me a good news hook, I want to write up a quick Telegram 101. What is Telegram, why does it matter, and why should you care?
What is Telegram?
Telegram is a messaging service, plus some other stuff.
The most basic functionality that Telegram offers is that it’s a messaging service. It’s similar to WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, iMessage, and many others. But the feature that distinguishes Telegram from many of these other services is its Channels feature, which function something like Facebook groups or blog posts. Any person or group can create a Channel which other users can subscribe to and get updates from. Channels are for the most part a unidirectional broadcast - subscribers can give reactions and comments on messages sent through the Channel, but only the Channel owner can send messages. Popular channels can reach millions of subscribers and become important vectors of news and information.
Telegram also supports group chats that can reach into the hundreds of thousands of users. These can be set up as private or public for anyone to join. It’s somewhat baffling to me that people would enjoy being in a group chat with hundreds of thousands of strangers, but apparently this is a feature that a lot of people use and appreciate.
Is Telegram encrypted?
The short answer is no. The longer answer is sometimes, but not reliably, and still almost always no.
On a level that doesn’t really count, almost everything on the internet is ‘encrypted’. Information sent between your device and servers is almost always encrypted - even you accessing www.InfiniteScroll.us is encrypted to this shallow level. But that’s not really what we mean when we use the word encrypted. What really counts is end-to-end encryption. Can anyone, at any point in the process, decrypt the information other than you and your intended recipient?
Truly secure messaging services like Signal, WhatsApp, or iMessage use this form of end-to-end encryption. Telegram by default does not. Telegram’s public channels are never end-to-end encrypted, and neither is any group chat on Telegram. Private, one on one messaging can be encrypted if you enable the ‘Secret Chats’ feature, but that feature is turned off by default. Telegram is fairly loud about being an ‘encrypted’ service and has likely fooled many of its users into believing that, but it’s just not true in any meaningful sense.1
Ben Thompson at Stratechery even believes this lack of security may even be intentional as a way to allow Telegram more scale:
One thing that is important to note here is that there are real advantages that come from not being encrypted. Telegram chats, for example, have their full history easily accessible from any device you sign in with; sync — both in terms of ongoing messages, and history — is much easier (or even viable) when you don’t have to deal with encryption. It is also far more scalable: WhatsApp and Signal only recently increased their group sizes to 1,024 and 1,000 maximum users recently, while iMessage is capped at 32.
Telegram Groups… can scale to 200,000 members. Note that that is a two orders of magnitude increase in capacity compared to WhatsApp and Signal; this is directly related to the fact that Telegram groups are not end-to-end encrypted.
I think that this point is crucial to understanding Telegram and its place in the market. Yes, the company has played extremely fast-and-easy with how it characterizes its product, to the extent that most users and media mistakenly believe the product has more inherent security than it does. What is also true, though, is that Telegram’s specific feature set are integral to the product-market fit it obtained: there is a place in the market for large scalable group discussion, and filling that hole in the market does depend on an absence of end-to-end encryption.
More on this ‘lack of security as a feature’ below.
When have I seen Telegram in the news?
All sorts of ways.
Telegram’s recently arrested founder Pavel Durov was recently in a big fight with messaging app Signal. He accused Signal of not being secure, and of being compromised by the US government. There’s no evidence that this is true and security experts pretty much unanimously believe that Signal is more secure than Telegram. Nevertheless, Durov started a big fight about Signal’s lack of security. This theory was then amplified by American conservatives who are mad that a few vaguely woke people are on Signal’s board of directors.
If you follow the Russia/Ukraine war, you will almost certainly have read about Telegram or received information directly from Telegram. The app is wildly popular in both Russia and Ukraine. Russian Telegram is filled with ‘mil-bloggers’ who chronicle the Russian war effort and spread ideas to Russia’s population, and Ukrainian Telegram serves the same functions. Everyday users get news updates and even use the app as a way to get air-raid alerts, while soldiers at the front document their experiences through the app. When infamous Wagner mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin announced he was rebelling and marching on Moscow in 2023, he did so via Telegram. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the vast majority of OSINT efforts and war documentation comes through Telegram. The war has been very good for Telegram, and led to a dramatic increase in users and prominence.
You may also have read about the shadowy ties between the Kremlin and Telegram. There’s evidence that Telegram has at some point cut a deal with the Russian government - I would classify the evidence as significant but not conclusive. This is where we circle back around to the ‘insecurity as a feature’ discussion. If you’re an authoritarian government, what tool could possibly be better than a messaging app that most people believe is secure but isn’t actually secure? As mentioned above the vast majority of Telegram is not encrypted, and even the Secret Chats feature is deliberately hard to use.2
You can see the gestalt of insecurity forming here. It’s a messaging service owned by a Russian billionaire. It’s marketed as secure when it’s very much not secure, and hasn’t updated its encryption features in years.3 That same billionaire tries to denigrate other encrypted messaging apps and encourage people to only use Telegram. It’s a wildly popular service in Russia and other Russian-speaking countries and a vital tool for war related communications. Reporting indicates the Russian government seems to have backdoors into many conversations on the app. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Telegram has been left insecure on purpose as a tool of state espionage - especially since Durov has folded to the Russian government before when he sold his stake in the social network VKontake after pressure from Russian authorities to allow them access to user information. This theory can’t be conclusively proven yet, but there are certainly a lot of things pointing in that direction.
There’s also one more reason you may seen Telegram mentioned in the news - it’s home to some of the most truly vile stuff on the internet.
Why has the Telegram founder been arrested?
Telegram is infamous for having essentially zero moderation. They operate with a tiny team, only about 50 employees, and thus couldn’t do content moderation even if they wanted to. But they also don’t even want to content moderate. From their FAQ:
Q: There's illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?
All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them.
That is a full stop answer - Telegram does not process any requests. Not related to terrorism, not related to illicit child sexual abuse material (CSAM), not anything. And so it’s no surprise that Telegram has become a haven for all the worst things on the internet.
To save time I’m just going to link to a variety of stories about how neo-Nazis use the site to organize, how the site is used to instigate ethnic violence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, how it was used by the Proud Boys to organize the January 6th insurrection, how it’s the center of illicit drug markets, how it’s the favorite messaging app for ISIS and a wide variety of terrorist groups including Hamas, how it’s used to distribute ‘rape videos’, hate speech and religious violence in India, and of course - CSAM (link is academic and safe). So, so much of that.
Every site struggles with content moderation. I’ve written here before that content moderation at scale is essentially impossible, and that I’m very sympathetic to companies struggling with moderation scandals. It’s hard to get that stuff right, or even close to right! No matter what you do, somebody’s going to be mad.
But every other site at least tries to moderate awful stuff like CSAM and ISIS terrorism. Telegram actively spits in the face of those efforts. It uses a labyrinth of legal maneuvering to make sure that it’s very difficult for governments to request data. And even if governments do manage to jump through the legal hoops, Telegram doesn’t respond. That’s why Durov was arrested - the French government repeatedly requested that Telegram cooperate in criminal investigations against child predators and got no response. That violates French law, and so now Durov awaits trial.
Durov’s arrest has become a flashpoint in a ‘free speech vs content moderation’ debate. I’m almost always sympathetic to the free speech side of things here - I think it’s a really bad precedent to arrest a CEO for content moderation decisions, or to hold the CEO personally responsible for what his site’s users post. But it really is shocking just how little Telegram cares. Every country has *some* restrictions on speech, even if it’s just barebones stuff like CSAM. And remember - Telegram is 99% not encrypted. Apps like Signal or WhatsApp have the technical excuse that they literally can’t turn over user conversations - they can’t read them! That’s because Signal and WhatsApp are truly end-to-end encrypted and the company legitimately can’t see anything you write. Telegram can absolutely see and read the vast majority of its users messages. It’s been built that way deliberately, and simply chooses not to respond to police requests about terrorism or CSAM. I’m very, very pro-free speech in most cases but it’s hard to defend Telegram’s behavior here.
Why Telegram Matters
Telegram sits squarely in the center of some of the world’s most important geopolitical and technological trends. It’s the messaging app of choice for the war in Ukraine - and is broadly becoming more popular in many places of the world and for many different conflicts.4 Geopolitically the app is absolutely crucial for open-source intelligence gathering efforts.
It’s also at the middle of debates about free speech, content moderation, and authoritarianism. You can’t talk about Telegram without talking about its suspicious ties to the Russian government, it’s campaign against other encrypted messaging services, and it’s extreme disregard for literally any content moderation at all.
Telegram also sits squarely in the middle of a trend I mention here frequently - the web’s movement away from global spaces into more fractured, localized spaces. Truly universal and global forums like Twitter and TikTok are slowly moving out of favor, while platforms that offer more localized and less global conversations are thriving. I normally mention Slack and Discord here, which allow you to converse with a few hundred or thousand people at a time but are walled off from the wider internet. I also mention Reddit, with its subreddit based approach that builds small communities in the thousands or tens of thousands. I also mention the Substack network and the return of blogging. But Telegram’s channels often function similarly to subreddits or blogs - large enough to build a critical mass of users and be important channels, but well short of the true global nature of posting on Twitter. Telegram is well-positioned to take advantage of this trend in the social internet.
Even if you don’t have any active plans to use Telegram, it’s become too important to ignore. It sits at the middle of too many different trends, and thanks to Durov’s arrest it’s now a geopolitical flashpoint between Russia and the West. All this means that you, the average internet denizen, should at least understand how Telegram works and what it might mean moving forward.
You have to scroll through 3-4 menus before you reach the option to have a Secret Chat, and the feature only works if both people are actively online at the same time.
Technically the *method* of encryption has been updated, but there has been zero movement since 2016 to make more parts of Telegram encrypted or to make encrypted chats more user-friendly
Including the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Telegram's lack of content moderation is not dissimilar to FB's failures regarding Myanmar dating back to 2012 - a lack of will driven in (large?) part by profit motive. With only 50 Telegram employees and about 3/4 billion users, Telegram is arguably more egregious. At least FB attempted to address its critics, even if for PR purposes.
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/02/an-update-on-myanmar/
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/
https://time.com/6217730/myanmar-meta-rohingya-facebook/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59558090
I think an important and under-discussed aspect of the content moderation debate is algorithmic recommendations.
If a company truly is just a platform, just a publisher, in that it *only* provides people with a place to post/share content and doesn't promote anything in particular, then a completely hands-off, "we're not responsible for what our users post" policy makes some sense (though it's still not quite that simple, imho). If a company is promoting content to generate more clicks (presumably for surveillance advertising, which is another important and under-discussed part of all this), it's now more of a distributor (I'm paraphrasing Matt Stoller from the Substack BIG, which I heartily recommend), and bears more responsibility for content moderation, imho.
Since Telegram, as I understand it, does promote content through what seems at a glance to me to be more or less the conventional surveillance advertising business model, to me that means it's basically full of shit in its one-dimensionally libertarian attitude toward content moderation.
The SCOTUS's recent ruling on Section 230 should have an impact on all this going forward, one would think.