What you need to know about Telegram, embattled app Hamas uses to spread its message - explainer

(JTA) — Telegram, the wildly popular messaging platform beloved by the far right and instrumental to both sides in the Israel-Hamas war, has suddenly found itself in the crosshairs of European law enforcement and regulators.

French authorities made a surprise arrest of Telegram’s founder and CEO last week, a significant escalation in the growing efforts by governments to hold social media platforms liable for the often illegal and violent content they host.

And on Friday, following scrutiny of its lax content moderation policies, Telegram made several Hamas channels inaccessible, including the group’s main avenue for communicating with followers.

“The writing’s on the wall,” Samuel Woolley, chair of Disinformation Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re going to see continued legislation clamping down on illicit uses of social media and messaging apps like Telegram.”

Here’s what you need to know about the famous and controversial app.

What is Telegram?

But it may be more accurate to think of Telegram as a platform like Facebook or X, formerly Twitter. Users can join “groups” with up to 200,000 people or “channels” with no cap on membership. These function as feeds where administrators can broadcast messages to subscribers.

Founded by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov in 2013, it’s the successor to his other hugely popular app, VKontakte or VK, essentially a Russian Facebook. After the Kremlin pressured Durov to fork over user data to Russian security services, Durov sold his stake in the company, fled Russia, and developed Telegram.

That origin story is vital to understanding Telegram’s way of operating.

“He does everything to be independent of national governments, and this is all out of the tradition of resisting the Russian government,” said Kilian Bühling, a researcher who studies digital mobilization at Germany’s Weizenbaum Institute.

Why do extremists love it?

There are a few reasons the app is so conducive to mobilization.

And that attitude extends to Telegram’s hands-off policy around content moderation. Where most platforms employ teams of people to monitor content and try to remove explicit antisemitism and other hate speech, Telegram’s rules for posting are comparatively meager.

Its “Terms of Use” clock in at just 100 words (97 if you don’t count the words “terms,” “of” and “use”). The app says it bans spam, the promotion of violence, and illegal pornographic content.

The app has also built a reputation for privacy, though data protection experts say this is mostly spin. The only encryption that exists on the app is for one-to-one messages. Even then, users need to opt in; encryption is not an automatic setting as it is on Signal, Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger. And many cryptographers say Telegram’s encryption is not up to snuff.

“Telegram has been very successful in falsely marketing itself as being a secure application,” said Jan Penfrat, senior policy advisor at European Digital Rights, an association of European nonprofits focused on online privacy issues.

In addition, the app’s functionality serves the aims of the far right, which looks to broadcast messages to broad audiences, amplify alternative media, and connect regional movements to national ones, all sans oversight.

Penfrat pointed to the ability to create large groups or popular channels on the app and added, “If you can do this without any moderation, that’s obviously something that can be very appealing for people to spread illegal content.”

What do Jewish watchdogs say about it?

“Our research has found that your platform, more than any other, is being used by terror-promoting far-right networks and is home to the most extreme, genocidal, and directly violent antisemitic content,” the letter said. “We are calling on Telegram to be consistent and take serious action against the terrorist content still on the platform that is putting Jewish and other minoritized communities at risk.”

Signatories included several British Parliament members as well as heads of a number of Jewish organizations, such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

This summer, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a civil liberties nonprofit, called on the British government and platforms like Telegram to remove racist anti-migrant content in the wake of far-right riots in the United Kingdom this summer.

The Anti-Defamation League, which has run pressure campaigns against both Facebook and X to persuade them to do more to counter hate speech, has also followed the growth of extremism on Telegram. The group observed an unusually high proportion of antisemitic content on Telegram in 2020 and, after October 7, 2023, documented a 433% increase in posts calling for violence against Jews, Israelis, or Zionists. Rates of hate speech remain higher than before October 7, said Oren Segal, who heads the ADL’s Center on Extremism.

“Telegram is the platform of choice for antisemites across the ideological spectrum,” he said. “Anybody who is in the business of tracking antisemitism is very familiar with Telegram because of how much is on that platform and how much various antisemitic and extremist groups rely on it.”

But unlike more mainstream social media platforms that the ADL has worked with and also publicly criticized, Telegram is hard to engage on the topic of combating hate speech because the app hasn’t acknowledged how big of a problem it is, Segal said.

Yfat Barak-Cheney, the director of technology and human rights at the World Jewish Congress, called Telegram “a gateway for terrorist propaganda on social media platforms” but shared Segal’s frustrations.

“We have made this information available to government leaders and international institutions and have long called for regulative action to be taken,” she said in a statement. “To date, the platform has not heeded any calls for increased monitoring and moderation.”

How has it been used in Israel and the Palestinian territories since October 7?

Telegram, based in Dubai, has long been popular in the Middle East, and its usage has surged in Israel and the region following October 7. That’s partly because both the Israeli military and Hamas have relied on it as a critical messaging platform.

As of October 2023, the month of Hamas’ attack and the war’s outbreak, Israel had around 2.5 million active weekly users, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm — amounting to about one in four Israelis.

Statistics on Palestinian usage are harder to come by, but Telegram has served as Hamas’ key platform for communication throughout the war. Members used Telegram to share first-person videos of the October 7 attack, often depicting gruesome scenes, and still rely on the app to spread content to subscribers around the world.

It has also uploaded videos of hostages, including one of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whom the terror group recently murdered along with five other captives.

In the days after October 7, the Telegram channel of Hamas’ military wing nearly quadrupled in size to more than 700,000 followers. Content on its main channel was viewed exponentially more than the identical posts on the terror group’s app, according to The New York Times.

The app faced pressure in the days after October 7 to ban Hamas-aligned channels as other platforms, such as Facebook. and X, have done. Durov pushed back initially, saying Hamas was using the app to warn civilians to leave areas before missile strikes. But he eventually relented in a rare instance of content moderation, restricting the channels on Apple and Google devices. But Telegram offered workarounds, and the content is still findable and shareable months later.

That has changed somewhat in recent days, as Telegram appears to have blocked access to Hamas’ main channel following Durov’s arrest and a spate of reporting on its permissive policies.

The Israeli military also uses the app to spread its messaging as well as to send out official updates like siren alerts and press releases to its 135,000-plus subscribers. Leading Israeli journalists such as Amit Segal, political activists such as the right-wing rapper and provocateur known as the Shadow, and government agencies such as the Health Ministry also have popular channels.

Telegram is especially useful in wartime and amid cell service disruptions, since it can operate on WiFi, so “using these kinds of applications for simple messaging when SMS isn’t available is a big benefit to folks,” Woolley said.

But in the wake of the October 7 attack, the Israel Internet Association, which seeks to encourage safety and transparency online, warned Israelis against unfettered use of Telegram.

“In light of the Hamas attack, the war in Gaza, and the need for urgent and current information, thousands of Israelis have chosen to join the Telegram app,” read a statement from the group. “But many are unaware of the characteristics and dangers embedded in it. … We recommend prohibiting the installation of the app among youth given that it features hurtful and violent content without appropriate moderation or supervision, and lacks a functional reporting mechanism.”

IDF soldiers have also used the app for illicit purposes. Members of an Israeli Defense Forces Psychological Warfare unit operated a channel called “72 Virgins – Uncensored,” posting gore-filled videos of dead civilians and racist language at the beginning of the war.

The IDF at first denied the accusation but later told Haaretz that the account was operated without authorization.

What happens next?

The first is from the French legal system. Durov was charged with complicity in spreading child pornography, selling narcotics, and aiding organized crime. He was released on a 5 million euro bail and ordered to stay in France while he faces a potential trial.

The second is the European Union’s new landmark disinformation and hate speech law, the Digital Services Act, under which the app is expected to face scrutiny.

There’s a hitch, though. The DSA’s hefty enforcement mechanisms only come into effect for so-called “very large online platforms” with more than 45 million EU users. Telegram says it has just 41 million, shielding it from regulators’ authority to fine the company up to 6% of its revenue.

The EU is now investigating whether Telegram fudged those numbers, according to a Financial Times investigation. If they reclassify the app, Telegram could be forced to institute content moderation policies or face harsh financial penalties.

“If founders and technology firms won’t, at the very least, come to the table to have a discussion about what can be done, as seems to be the case with Durov, then they are going to be made an example of,” Woolley said.