Far-right activists, violent white supremacists and neo-fascists who have built large followings on Telegram are jumping to the defense of the app’s founder, Pavel Durov.
Long before Durov was charged Wednesday with enabling criminality on the app, Telegram became notable as an essential gathering spot for people and groups who had been booted off mainstream social media platforms.
Telegram’s enthusiastic users include a spectrum of right-wing political figures, from conservative pundits and allies of former President Donald Trump to violent extremist groups that have staged white supremacist events. By contrast, it’s rare to find high-profile Democrats or progressives on it.
French prosecutors announced that Durov’s arrest was part of a larger investigation into “complicity” in the spread of child exploitation material and other nefarious activities on the app, but the right-wing Americans who have built followings on Telegram quickly framed the incident as a matter of free speech.
“Darkness is descending fast on the formerly free world,” conservative media figure Tucker Carlson, who has a large following on Telegram, wrote on X this week.
Telegram appears to have operated as normal since Durov’s arrest, and it’s not clear whether the criminal case will eventually force changes to the app to stem extremism or illegal activity.
In a statement in response to Durov’s arrest Saturday near Paris, Telegram said: “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”
Telegram isn’t as widely used in the U.S. as competitors such as WhatsApp, but researchers have observed for years that it has become critical to groups such as the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front by giving them the space to organize, recruit members and spread hate-filled propaganda. That has given the app the nickname “Terrorgam” among anti-hate researchers.
Telegram, which is based in Dubai, has long expressed reluctance to moderate or patrol content that people send on it, including many scams and other types of criminal behavior. It’s known for offering little cooperation with government requests. (Other tech companies, such as Meta, also sometimes turn down law enforcement requests but usually take them case by case.)
Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-hate group founded in 1971, called Telegram “very permissive.”
“They have barely any content moderation,” she said. “The content moderation they do have is pretty light-touch, so the folks who were getting deplatformed elsewhere found it pretty attractive.”
Squire said the platform also has technical advantages that make it more popular than fringe apps such as Gab or Rumble. For example, it rarely crashes, she said.
“It’s pretty easy to use. There are no ads. It’s fast,” she said.
If Telegram were to go away or change significantly, she said, the extremist users would most likely trickle to different places, including Gab and X.
Telegram has both one-on-one chat and groups, called channels, where users can broadcast messages to “subscribers,” though the service is free. It also has file storage, which is especially helpful for video creators, and a recommendation engine to suggest channels to follow.
Durov, in a post last year, defended the hosting of extremist material, including videos by Hamas, saying Telegram serves “as a unique source of first-hand information for researchers, journalists, and fact-checkers.”
Squire, who has researched extremists on Telegram for years, estimated that Telegram has 30,000 extremist channels worldwide, including those associated with QAnon conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists and other violent groups.
American white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who is banned on most social media apps but has more than 63,000 followers on Telegram, wrote on X that the arrest “is yet another outrageous attack on freedom of speech by Western elites who will stop at nothing to control and surveil all global communications.” Fuentes has frequently praised Adolf Hitler.
Keith Woods, an Irish white nationalist whose Telegram channel has over 30,000 subscribers, posted on X that the arrest was “madness” and that saying Durov was complicit in crimes on Telegram was like holding the telephone company liable. He has written about devoting his life to keeping European nations white.
And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga, who has faced suspensions on platforms including Facebook and what was then known as Twitter, wrote on X: “Free speech is under attack all over the world. Why are people’s opinions and voices such a threat?” Greene maintains two active and verified channels on Telegram, which together have over 98,000 followers.
Despite the claims that the arrest is a form of free speech suppression, Daphne Keller, director of the program on platform regulation at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, said most legal systems, including the U.S. system, could hold an app liable for failing to remove unencrypted child sexual abuse material when they are notified.
“I am usually one of the people making noise about free expression consequences when lawmakers go overboard regulating platforms. Possibly this will turn out to be one of those cases. But so far, I don’t think so,” Keller wrote in a post on LinkedIn.
She wrote that Telegram’s case may be analogous to that of Silk Road, a website seized by U.S. prosecutors in 2013, whose creator, Ross Ulbricht, was convicted in 2015 of seven counts of enabling illegal drug sales via bitcoin. (Trump has vowed to commute Ulbricht’s sentence.)
At least one big conservative account on Telegram, that of Trump-supporting former attorney Lin Wood, appeared open to the possibility that Telegram had committed wrongdoing.
“Pedophilia and child sex trafficking is the REAL ‘pandemic’ in our nation and the world,” Wood told his 301,000 subscribers in a post about the Telegram investigation. He added in a separate post: “Draw your own conclusions.”
Wood wrote in an email that he has no opinion on Durov or the impact of his arrest on Telegram. He said he uses Telegram because of its large, international audience, and he said he’s unaware of the white supremacist groups on it.
Telegram started to gather steam as a right-wing platform around 2019 after mass shootings at a mosque and Islamic center in Christchurch, New Zealand. Video of the shootings was widely available on Telegram, even after a crackdown by other apps, such as Facebook, according to a report that year by the Anti-Defamation League.
Telegram isn’t a member of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a tech industry organization dedicated to stopping the spread of graphic material like the Christchurch video, the forum confirmed Wednesday in an email.
Since the Christchurch shootings, Telegram has been a host for other violent videos, including of a 2019 mass shooting near a synagogue in Halle, Germany, videos taken by Hamas after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel and video of the 2022 attack on a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, where a white gunman killed 10 people because, he said, they were Black.
Among the active extremist channels on Telegram are several belonging to the Patriot Front, which splintered from the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. At least one of the Patriot Front channels has more than 19,000 followers.
Other channels are devoted to the far-right Proud Boys, a group whose former leader Enrique Tarrio is serving a 22-year prison sentence in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A study published this year by researchers at New York University and George Washington University identified 92 public Telegram channels explicitly affiliated with the Proud Boys.
The Proud Boys channels are primarily in the U.S. but also in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.K. and Germany, the researchers found, constituting “the core of a well-connected network with 131,953 subscribers.”
A rare example of Telegram removing extremist channels occurred just after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, when at least 15 of them were banned, according to an NBC News tally at the time. But the crackdown turned out to be an exception.
More mainstream right-wing channels have attracted followings in the five and six figures.
Trump doesn’t have a verified Telegram channel, though a channel with his name has more than 650,000 subscribers. A channel devoted to Trump’s “official” cryptocurrency project has more than 47,000 subscribers, and Donald Trump Jr. has a verified channel with more than 452,000 subscribers. Carlson’s verified channel has more than 265,000 subscribers, and Greene’s has more than 86,000.
Other longtime Trump associates have large accounts.
Mike Lindell, founder of MyPillow and a prominent denier of the 2020 election results, has a verified channel with more than 111,000 subscribers. He posts a variety of content, including support for Trump, pillow promotions and paid partnerships for investing in precious metals.
And another channel with more than 191,000 subscribers belongs to Michael Flynn, a national security adviser in the Trump administration whom Trump pardoned after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with a Russian diplomat.
