And the app has indeed been crucial in nations such as Belarus, where it was used for 2020 election protests, and in China last year during the COVID-lockdown demonstrations. “Our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism,” he told a crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2015, arguing that ISIS, which used Telegram to claim responsibility for or plan numerous attacks in Europe, “will always find way to communicate.” Durov has touted Telegram’s capacity to act as a form of digital resistance and has publicly fought Russian efforts to view encrypted messages on the platform. Read: How Ivermectin became a belief system Since its inception, Durov, known for his nomadic lifestyle and for posting cryptic philosophical messages and shirtless pictures of himself on Instagram, has positioned Telegram as a staunch anti-surveillance tool and rebuffed critics who have argued that the platform offers organization and communication abilities to dangerous groups. Pavel Durov told The New York Times in 2014 that Telegram was conceived out of a desire to have a free and secure communications platform out of the hands of the Russian state. The brothers, who founded a popular Russian social network, VKontakte, launched Telegram around the time Kremlin allies took over the platform. The brainchild of brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, Telegram shares the techno-libertarian sensibilities of its creators, especially its CEO, Pavel. It’s a theater of war, a clandestine marketplace, and a safe haven for the deplatformed to build their alternative realities, which makes Telegram an excellent fit for the turbulence of the 2020s and perhaps the most important app in the world today. Because the app is free to download, lightweight, and marketed as privacy-forward and anti-censorship, it attracts people looking to fly under the radar. Though public download numbers indicate that it has fewer users than chat platforms such as WhatsApp-700 million versus 2 billion every month-Telegram is the communications platform of choice for many activists, crypto scammers, drug dealers, terrorists, extremists, banned influencers, and conspiracy theorists. “Prigozhin broadcasted, organized, and orchestrated this all from the platform.” The app and individual channels within it-Prigozhin’s has grown to 1.3 million followers since it launched last November-are effectively feeders for the rest of the internet, according to Toler, who monitors, verifies, and reports on Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels: “Almost every bit of information about the war on Twitter, is downstream of Telegram.” Many popular accounts on these social platforms merely repackage what they see on Telegram, often using unreliable programs to translate the channels. “The RU/UA war is 99% Telegram,” Aric Toler, an investigative journalist for Bellingcat, which has reported extensively on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, told me this week over direct message. Just weeks into the Ukraine war, Time proclaimed that the decade-old app was “the digital battle space,” a moniker that held up over the weekend as onlookers used Telegram to try to suss out whether Russia was heading into civil war. Since Russia’s invasion, one of the quickest ways to follow the chaos on the ground has been to download Telegram and wade through live updates from citizens, soldiers, and the government-a digital morass of confusing, contradictory information. Reviews have been mixed: 155,600 fire emoji to 131,900 clown emoji.įor close followers of the ongoing conflict in Russia and Ukraine, it’s not unusual to see playful reaction emoji sitting just beneath pictures, videos, and text documenting the horrors of war in real time. It was the capstone to a tense and confusing geopolitical crisis-and it took the form of a voice memo on the popular app Telegram, where it was subject to a form of instant feedback. On Monday, in an 11-minute speech, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, reflected on his brief revolt against the Russian government.
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