The bewildering politics of Telegram

 

Technology

The bewildering politics of Telegram

 

Here are two big reasons the controversial app just became a global flashpoint.

 

Telegram’s claimed 950 million users are spread around the globe, and the app allows them to broadcast messages to up to 200,000 people. |

 

By Mohar Chatterjee, Derek Robertson and Maggie Miller

08/27/2024 05:00 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/26/telegram-app-politics-00176386

 

When Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested late Saturday at an airport outside Paris, accused of complicity in illegal online behavior and refusing to disclose information to authorities, right-leaning American political figures leapt to his defense, including Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

 

Left-leaning civil liberties groups also took Telegram’s side — to a point.

 

The arrest is casting a spotlight on the messy global status of a messaging app whose sprawling reach and commitment to free speech have earned it a rotating cast of friends and enemies in the political arena, and whose multinational structure raises tough questions about enforcing digital rules in the age of social media.

 

Telegram’s radical free speech position puts it in an unusual position among global social apps. Since Durov founded Telegram more than a decade ago, the theatrical and enigmatic Russian entrepreneur has become a primary character in the evolving global war over how wide-open online communication should be.

 

Telegram’s claimed 950 million users are spread around the globe, and the app allows them to broadcast messages to up to 200,000 people, giving it the power of a social media platform. But unlike mainstream social media apps, it also refuses on principle to take down any posts that violate local restrictions on speech, or disclose any data about their users to any government.

 

This has made it a darling of digital rights groups, such as Access Now, which have backed the app in its fights with authoritarian regimes in Iran, Myanmar and elsewhere — including Russia, where dissidents use its encrypted messaging to discuss the Ukraine war.

 

Then-Indonesian Communication and Information Minister Rudiantara (left) shakes hands with Pavel Durov during their meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2017. | Tatan Syuflana/AP

 

But it also means that users can spread disinformation and post about illegal activities without the company actively coming after them.

 

It’s the latter that appears to have gotten the founder in trouble. Durov was arrested as part of a larger judicial investigation opened by the cybercrime unit of the Paris Prosecutor’s Office on July 8. The charges include a range of offenses connected to activity allowed on Telegram, including fraud, money laundering and the distribution of child sexual abuse material.

 

In a post, Telegram said it complies with all European laws, and neither the platform or its founder could be blamed for the online abuse of the service.

 

Telegram’s lack of moderation tracks closely with the ideals of Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of X, and other critics on the political right, who say social media companies have gotten too cozy with governments — and that enforcement of rules against harmful speech amounts to state-sanctioned censorship.

 

Venture capitalist and prodigious Trump fundraiser David Sacks asked on X, “Are you getting sick of me saying ‘I told you so?’” citing a previous prediction that Telegram would be the target of government action similar to the U.S.’ forced sale of TikTok.

 

Musk took the prediction game even further: “POV: It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme,” he wrote on his platform as he reposted news of Durov’s arrest.

 

“Everyone on right-wing Silicon Valley Twitter is going crazy, and no one left of center cares or comments,” said Marshall Kosloff, a media fellow at the right-leaning tech think tank the Foundation for American Innovation. “Telegram is anti-moderation — that makes it right-wing coded.”

 

The transition of “free speech” from a liberal cause to a conservative one has defined the past decade in politics. Before social media became the dominant channel for political communication, the defense of free speech was mostly associated with organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, which protested book bans and argued for freedom of religious expression.

 

Now, conservatives have adopted civil libertarians’ rhetoric to protest what they see as liberal governments interfering in the ideally “neutral” public sphere of the internet. Musk himself hung previous executives of Twitter out to dry when he took over the platform and loosened its rules.

 

But in authoritarian countries, Telegram’s refusal to moderate has also earned it some level of respect from left-leaning civil society groups — even as they acknowledge the drawbacks of the platform.

 

“Civil society has had a complicated relationship with Telegram over the years,” Natalia Krapiva, senior tech legal counsel at Access Now, said Monday. “We have defended Telegram and its users against attempts by authoritarian regimes to block and coerce the platform into providing encryption keys, but we have also been raising alarms about Telegram’s lack of human rights policies, reliable channel of communication, and remedy for its users.”

 

“Telegram fails on most measures of corporate responsibility including transparency and accountability,” Krapiva said.

 

Telegram’s very distributed structure adds policy and enforcement questions to the political questions.

 

The platform’s geographic footprint is sprawling and hard to pin down, with data servers reportedly located all over the world, though their exact locations remain hidden. Durov himself relocated to Dubai in 2017, bringing the platform’s development team with him. Telegram continues to be headquartered in Dubai, where local IT regulations are friendlier than those of other countries they’ve tried before, according to the development team.

 

The nature of Telegram’s operations makes it particularly tricky for authorities from any country to pin down the platform’s core development team or access data on its users and operations. Durov — the most visible member of Telegram’s development team — has said on Telegram that he has both French and Russian citizenship. Investigators from the French customs department ultimately arrested Durov at the Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday evening.

 

It’s unclear whether the U.S. government is assisting its French counterparts in the investigation. A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment, and officials at the State Department and the French Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

 

Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said Monday that there is “no legitimate defense of a platform that allows” material such as child sexual abuse imagery, which researchers say has been traded on private channels on Telegram.

 

“In liberal democracies, we make laws, and there are some things that are, of course, not permissible,” Krebs said. “There are curbs that governments can put in place and the French government has taken action here. I wonder why the guy felt comfortable going to Paris, given some of the scrutiny.”

 

Brendan Bordelon contributed to this report.