From time to time, the spiritual center of the Internet changes, as a place where online culture is molded and incubated before spreading in broader global cycles to a new home.
Today, that shift is happening again, with Telegram taking the main stage. In recent years, the messaging app and digital platform has recurringly become the place for the rawest, most direct coverage of massive international crises, first with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and now with Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent month-long massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
The app allows users to accept encrypted messages, which is why high-profile and harmful movements and events have been organized there, such as the Jan. 6 assault on the U. S. Capitol. Far-right and neo-Nazis have used Telegram to plan and recruit in the U. S. in the U. S. and abroad; This fall, organizing and communication on the platform allegedly provoked anti-Semitic violence against the Jewish people in Dagestan, Russia, and may have played a role in exacerbating Azerbaijani violence against Armenians.
With 800 million accounts, Telegram ranks at the bottom of the top ten most sensible social media platforms in terms of users. But his influence goes beyond that. ” Almost all images of the confrontation are now just below Telegram, in the same way as data on Facebook/Instagram collected from Twitter,” tweeted New York Times visual investigative journalist Aric Toler on Oct. 11, as new footage of the Oct. 7 attack and Israeli airstrikes on Gaza spread across the web after they made the first impression on the platform. (Toler, in his previous assignment at Bellingcat, helped pioneer open-source intelligence reporting. )
Everyday people also find the app indispensable. Darren Loucaides, who has written extensively about Telegram, chronicled in a piece for Wired how during the heat of the October 7 attacks, in the earliest moments, when Israeli media and the government hadn’t shared much information, Telegram was the only source giving civilians insight.
That speed is a major component of the app’s appeal. Journalists will have to check the data they publish, which can slow down their writing. Telegram users are not bound by any such code and can post without delay anything they find. Telegram also does not censor gruesome photographs or depictions of violence which are not unusual in conflicts, but this may not pass the filters of Meta or other major social media companies. And almost no one is excluded from Telegram, which not only makes it a ripe position for influence operations, but also gives teams banned on other social networks a place to speak, adds Hamas, whose own posts in the early hours of the October 7 attacks were kidnapped. one of the main sources of data on what was happening in Israel. In repressive regimes like Russia, where almost the entire social media bureaucracy is subject to state control, the app is also a rare means of freely sharing and locating data, making it indispensable for dissidents or anyone who is not completely According to them. the state.
Telegram’s rise has been long but steady. Pavel Durov, a programmer and entrepreneur, founded the company in 2013 after being kicked out of VK, the Russian competitor to Facebook he co-founded. Telegram spent years as a popular messaging app and platform but gained momentum in 2021 after WhatsApp users fled following updates to its privacy policy, mistakenly believing they would have to shell out more non-public knowledge to continue employing the Facebook-owned messaging service. Telegram downloads peaked in what Durov later proudly proclaimed could be “the largest virtual migration in human history. “
In the U. S. , some of the first significant virtual mobilization efforts on Telegram would have arguably been led by the far right, which jumped from platform to platform after being cracked down by big tech corporations following the Charlottesville rally in 2017. Conservative anti-vaxxers, QAnoners, JFK comeback cultists, eco-fascists, Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis have all mingled on the app, recruiting and organizing other actions, from, as mentioned, Jan. 6, aspects of making plans, to flooding hospitals with calls opposing safe covid treatments. A similar dynamic has played out in Europe, where the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a Berlin-based nonprofit, has documented how Telegram has become the preeminent platform of the far-right in Germany, Austria, and Sweden.
But Telegram has continued widely beyond the political margins, especially in countries with repressive surveillance regimes, and has a data center on foreign conflicts. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the app proved to be an important source of data for citizens of both countries. So valuable that Russian activists who may have been arrested after the app was infiltrated by police continue to use it after being released, as Loucaides has also documented. Since the Hamas attacks on Israel, studies by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Laboratory have found that Hamas-linked Telegram channels have amassed thousands of new subscribers.
“It was a window into all these parts of the world,” says Ben Ditto, a cultural analyst and visual artist who often mines Telegram for content for his own social media accounts. They include a Telegram channel Ditto created five years ago, after what he saw as onerous moderation by Instagram repeatedly left his content downranked. As Russia invaded Ukraine, he realized how much of that war could be seen on Telegram. He discovered Ukranian far-right and anarchist group chats where he could directly observe conversations and see content that was posted almost immediately after being filmed on the ground. “It’s an amazing way of being closer to the source than anything else,” Ditto explains.
Telegram’s raw, unfiltered nature makes it ripe for manipulation and potential crossovers of influence. During the Oct. 7 attacks, Hamas used the channel to temporarily broadcast photographs highlighting the military movements of its fighters, waging a narrative crusade designed to sow concern in Israel on a platform known for leaving almost everything out of the question. Content that is completely illegal, such as content about child abuse. alone. Although Ditto believes that the Telegram channels of Igor Girkin and Wagner PMC are useful resources on what is happening in Russia, he says that the messages of the former Russian FSB officer and the personal organization of the Russian army should be read with skepticism because they are most likely to have interaction in propaganda and influence. Crusades.
For many Telegram users, the balance between lack of moderation and the breadth of what you can have pays off. Jake Hanrahan, founder of the Popular Front, a multimedia publication that also adds photographs of conflicts on its social media. He told me on Telegram that he believes the platform is “one of the most important online right now. “
“Because of the lack of oversight, fake data may look more like Telegram, but that’s life,” he said. “It’s very detrimental to call on someone like Mark Zuckerberg to do due diligence for you, and that’s essentially what censorship issues on Instagram boil down to. “
Meta follows the government’s recommendations when it comes to blocking organizations’ access to its products. These decisions of moderation are in line with the Western political consensus: the Taliban, for example, remains banned despite being the governing body of Afghanistan.
“[Meta] is regularly censoring reporting that shows how brutal the IDF are in their current mission to flatten Gaza,” Hanrahan says. “Meta had been doing this for years though. Every conflict, they pick a side that’s allowed and everyone who doesn’t fall in line has to suffer the consequences of shadow bans or having your page removed.”
Since Oct. 7, Meta users posting pro-Palestinian messages have reported being censored on Instagram and Facebook, as have ByteDance TikTok users, prompting a complaint from civil society groups. When asked for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to a corporate page about the ongoing dispute. where the company writes that “there is no fact to the suggestion that we are intentionally suppressing voice. “But a human rights committee commissioned through the company after an outbreak of violence in Israel and Palestine in 2021 found that Palestinian users had suffered “over-enforcement” that infringed on “freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation and non-discrimination. “
Hanrahan says that he had dealt with the downsides of Meta moderation directly. Roughly three years ago, Popular Front was frequently posting on Instagram about Turkish attacks on the Kurdish area of Afrin in Syria; Hanrahan recalls the publication’s account was removed from the service four times in a month. “Eventually someone at Meta privately reached out to me and told me a Turkish ultranationalist who works there was purposely banning our account. I can’t confirm this was true, but he told me he’d put a note on the account to stop the arbitrary bans and said he withdrew that guy’s access,” Hanrahan said.
A Meta spokesperson did not address what happened to Popular Front’s acccount, but claimed in an emailed statement that the company’s content moderation is not supposed to work this way. “Our policies are designed to give people a voice while keeping them safe on our platforms, and we apply these policies regardless of who is posting or their personal beliefs,” the spokesperson wrote.
Hanrahan estimates that 20 percent of the conflict footage Popular Front aggregates onto its social media channels (including Telegram) comes from Telegram. Other conflict footage aggregators and investigators, like the New York Times’ Toler, also draw significantly from the platform.
As Telegram’s popularity has grown, the physics and regulations of its platform have replaced the general patterns of receiving information, and far beyond the aggregators and news seekers who use the service for commercial purposes. Since Telegram posts are almost never moderated, it only depends on the user on the veracity of the information. Many daily users don’t, allowing the platform to become a recurring point of spreading misinformation.
Telegram has also allowed many other people far away to witness the horrors of the army’s invasions and massacres. While Instagram Stories are often mundane updates about other people’s daily lives, users are more likely to post about more vital topics, social unrest, and local, national, and foreign conflicts. Today, many of the Gaza images posted on Stories can be discovered on Telegram, where, before being posted on Instagram, users had the option to edit them to have a greater chance to object to the site’s moderation policies.
While Israel has banned foreign journalists from reporting in Gaza and killed more than 40 journalists there, Telegram provides a means to distribute newsworthy content, adding the perspectives of Gazans largely cut off from the world. glimpsing the true ramifications of what’s happening, airing horrific photographs of Israeli missile victims that may not have escaped the policies of the larger social media platforms.
In “Looking At War,” her essay on the Iraq War that explores the strength and limits of engagement photography, Susan Sontag explored how photographs of the war’s atrocities may not affect the public: “Inundated with photographs of the kind that once shocked and outraged, we lose our ability to respond. “
This was true at the beginning of the U. S. -led global war on terror. But writing in 2002, I might not have imagined a world in which the public could see photographs and videos posted directly through the other people who were being bombed.
“I think the Palestinians’ remedy over the last 75 years has been less difficult to hide,” Ditto told me. Thanks to platforms like Telegram, he noted, “what is happening can no longer be denied, and a cultural change has been created. ” “.
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