Telegram CEO gets support from far-right extremists and activists who thrive on the app

Far-right activists, violent white supremacists and neo-fascists with large followings on Telegram are defending the app’s founder, Pavel Durov.

Long before Durov was charged on Wednesday with facilitating crime on the app, Telegram had become a major meeting place for people and groups who had been banned from major social media platforms.

Telegram’s avid users span a spectrum of right-wing political figures, from conservative pundits and allies of former President Donald Trump to violent extremist groups that have hosted white supremacist events. By contrast, it’s rare to find prominent Democrats or progressives on Telegram.

French prosecutors announced that Durov’s arrest was part of a larger investigation into “complicity” in the distribution of child abuse material and other shady activities on the app, but right-wing Americans who have built a following on Telegram were quick to portray the incident as a matter of free speech.

“Darkness is rapidly descending on the formerly free world,” conservative media figure Tucker Carlson, who has a large Telegram following, wrote on X this week.

Telegram appears to be functioning normally since Durov’s arrest, and it is unclear whether the criminal case will ultimately lead to changes to the app to counter extremism or illegal activity.

In a statement responding to Durov’s arrest Saturday near Paris, Telegram said: “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the abuse of that platform.”

Telegram isn’t as widely used in the U.S. as rivals WhatsApp, but researchers have noted for years that it has become crucial to groups like the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front because it provides a space for them to organize, recruit members and spread hateful propaganda. That’s earned the app the nickname “Terrorgam” among anti-hate researchers.

Dubai-based Telegram has long expressed reluctance to moderate or police the content people post on it, which includes many scams and other forms of criminal behavior. It has a reputation for being uncooperative when it comes to government requests. (Other tech companies, such as Meta, also sometimes decline law enforcement requests, but usually handle them on a case-by-case basis.)

Megan Squire, associate director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-hate group founded in 1971, called Telegram “highly permissive.”

“They have very little content moderation,” she said. “The content moderation they do have is pretty light, so the people who were being taken off their platform elsewhere found it quite appealing.”

Squire said the platform also has technical advantages that make it more popular than fringe apps like 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 disappear or change significantly, extremist users would most likely move to other places, including Gab and X, she said.

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 useful for video creators, and a recommendation engine to suggest channels to follow.

In a post last year, Durov defended hosting extremist material, including Hamas videos, saying Telegram is “a unique source of first-hand information for researchers, journalists and fact-checkers.”

Squire, who has spent years researching extremists on Telegram, estimates that Telegram has 30,000 extremist channels worldwide, including channels 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 free speech by Western elites bent on controlling and surveilling all global communications.” Fuentes has often 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 phone company accountable. He has written about dedicating his life to keeping European countries white.

And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who has faced suspensions from platforms including Facebook and what was then known as Twitter, wrote on X: “Freedom of 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 more than 98,000 followers.

Despite claims that the arrest is a form of suppression of free speech, Daphne Keller, director of the Platform Regulation Program at the Stanford Cyber ​​Policy Center, said most legal systems, including the U.S. system, can hold an app liable if it fails to remove unencrypted child sexual abuse material when notified.

“I’m usually one of those people who makes noise about the consequences of free speech when lawmakers go overboard with regulating platforms. Perhaps this will turn out to be one of those cases. But so far, I don’t think so,” Keller wrote in a LinkedIn post.

She wrote that Telegram’s case could be similar to that of Silk Road, a website seized by U.S. prosecutors in 2013 and whose creator, Ross Ulbricht, was convicted in 2015 on seven counts of facilitating illegal drug sales via bitcoin. (Trump has pledged to commute Ulbricht’s sentence.)

At least one major conservative account on Telegram, that of Trump-supporting former attorney Lin Wood, appeared open to the possibility that Telegram had engaged in misconduct.

“Pedophilia and child sex trafficking is the REAL ‘pandemic’ in our country 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 is not aware of the white supremacist groups that are on it.

Telegram began to gain popularity 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 on other apps, including Facebook, according to a report that year from the Anti-Defamation League.

Telegram is not a member of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a technology industry group that works to prevent the spread of graphic material like the Christchurch video, the forum confirmed in an email on Wednesday.

Since the Christchurch shooting, Telegram has hosted more violent videos, including from a 2019 mass shooting at a synagogue in Halle, Germany, videos made by Hamas after the October 7 terror attacks in Israel, and videos from the 2022 Buffalo, New York, supermarket attack in which 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 split 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 dedicated 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 located in the US, but also in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and Germany, the researchers found. They form “the core of a well-connected network with 131,953 subscribers.”

A rare example of Telegram taking down extremist channels came shortly after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, when at least 15 of them were banned, according to an NBC News count at the time. But the crackdown appeared to be an outlier.

The more right-wing stations have audiences in the five- to six-figure range.

Trump does not have a verified Telegram channel, though a channel bearing his name has over 650,000 subscribers. A channel dedicated to Trump’s “official” cryptocurrency project has over 47,000 subscribers, and Donald Trump Jr. has a verified channel with over 452,000 subscribers. Carlson’s verified channel has over 265,000 subscribers, and Greene’s has over 86,000.

Other longtime Trump associates have large accounts.

Mike Lindell, founder of MyPillow and a prominent 2020 election denier, has a verified channel with over 111,000 subscribers. He posts a variety of content, including support for Trump, pillow promotions, and paid partnerships for precious metals investments.

Another channel with more than 191,000 subscribers is that of Michael Flynn, a national security adviser in the Trump administration. Trump pardoned him after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with a Russian diplomat.