Telegram's founder, Pavel Durov, has been defended by many of the app's many followers – including far-right activists, violent white supremacists and neo-fascists.
Long before Durov was indicted on Wednesday for enabling criminal activity on the app, Telegram had emerged as a vital meeting place for people and groups exiled from mainstream social media platforms.
Telegram's avid users include a range of right-wing politicians, from conservative commentators and allies of former President Donald Trump to violent extremist groups that have held white supremacist events. By contrast, prominent Democrats and progressives rarely use the app.
French prosecutors said Durov's arrest was part of a larger investigation into “complicity” in the spreading of child exploitation material on the app and other malign activities, but right-wingers in the United States who have built up a following on Telegram were quick to frame the case as a freedom of speech issue.
“Darkness is falling rapidly upon a once free world,” Tucker Carlson, a conservative media figure with a large Telegram following, wrote on X this week.
Telegram appears to have been operating normally since Durov's arrest, but it is unclear whether the criminal case will lead to changes being made to the app to curb extremism and illegal activity.
“It is absurd to claim that the platform or its owners are responsible for the misuse of its platform,” Telegram said in a statement responding to Durov's arrest near Paris on Saturday.
While Telegram is not as widely used in the US as rival apps like WhatsApp, researchers have observed for years that it has been crucial to groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, providing a space for them to organize, recruit, and spread hateful propaganda, leading anti-hate researchers to nickname the app “terror gum.”
Dubai-based Telegram has long voiced its reluctance to moderate or monitor the content users send on its service, including scams and other criminal activity, and the company is known for rarely cooperating with government requests. (Other tech companies, such as Meta, have sometimes turned down law enforcement requests, but typically handle them on a case-by-case basis.)
Megan Squire, vice director of data and analysis at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-hate group founded in 1971, described Telegram as “highly tolerant.”
“They do very little content moderation,” she said, “and what little content moderation they do has been pretty light, which made them very attractive to people who were being shut out of other platforms.”
Squire said the platform also has technical advantages that make it more popular than lesser known apps like Gab and Rumble. For example, it rarely crashes, she said.
“It's very easy to use, there are no ads and it's fast,” she said.
If Telegram were to disappear or be significantly altered, extremist users would likely flock to other platforms, such as Gab or X, she said.
Telegram has one-on-one chats and groups, called channels, where users can broadcast messages to “subscribers,” and the service is free. It also has file storage, which is particularly useful for video creators, and a recommendation engine that suggests channels to follow.
In a post last year, Durov defended hosting extremist content, including Hamas videos, saying Telegram served as a “unique source of first-hand information for researchers, journalists and fact-checkers.”
Squire, a long-time researcher into extremism on Telegram, estimates that the platform is home to 30,000 extremist channels around the world, including those associated with QAnon conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists and other violent groups.
Nick Fuentes, an American white supremacist who is banned from most social media apps but has more than 63,000 followers on Telegram, wrote on X that the arrests were “yet another outrageous attack on free speech by Western elites who will stop at nothing to control and monitor all communication around the world.” Fuentes frequently praises Adolf Hitler.
Keith Woods, an Irish white supremacist with over 30,000 subscribers on Telegram, wrote on X that the arrest was “madness” and that Durov's comments on Telegram accusing him of participating in crimes was like putting the blame on the phone company. Woods wrote that he would dedicate his life to keeping European countries white supremacist.
And Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has been suspended by Facebook and the platform then known as Twitter, wrote to X, “Free speech is under attack around the world. Why should people's opinions and voices be so threatened?” Greene runs two active, verified channels on Telegram with a combined total of more than 98,000 followers.
Despite claims that the arrests are a form of suppression of free speech, Daphne Keller, director of the Platform Regulation Program at Stanford University's Cyber ​​Policy Center, said most legal systems, including the US system, can hold apps accountable if they fail to remove unencrypted child sexual abuse material when notified.
“I'm usually one of those people who worries about what happens to free expression when lawmakers overly regulate platforms. Perhaps this will be one of those cases, but so far it doesn't seem like it,” Keller wrote in a LinkedIn post.
She writes that Telegram's case may be similar to that of Silk Road, a website seized by US prosecutors in 2013. Silk Road's founder, Ross Ulbricht, was convicted on seven counts in 2015 of enabling the sale of illegal drugs through Bitcoin. (Trump has vowed to commute Ulbricht's sentence.)
At least one major conservative account on Telegram, that of pro-Trump former lawyer Lin Wood, appeared to acknowledge that Telegram may have engaged in wrongdoing.
“Pedophilia and child sex trafficking are a true 'pandemic' in our country and the world,” Wood told his 301,000 subscribers in a Telegram post about the investigation. “Draw your own conclusions,” he added in another post.
Wood said in an email that he had no opinion about Durov or how his arrest might affect Telegram, saying he uses the platform because of its large international user base and that he is not aware of any white supremacist groups there.
Telegram began to gain traction as a right-wing platform around the time of the 2019 mass shootings at mosques and Islamic centers in Christchurch, New Zealand. According to an Anti-Defamation League report that year, videos of the shootings were widely available on Telegram even after other apps, including Facebook, cracked down on them.
Telegram is not a member of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a tech industry group that aims to stop the spread of brutal content like the Christchurch video, the forum confirmed in an email on Wednesday.
Since the Christchurch shooting, Telegram has also distributed other violent videos, including one from a mass shooting near a synagogue in Halle, Germany in 2019, a video filmed by Hamas after the October 7 terror attack in Israel, and a video from 2022 of a white gunman attacking a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people because they were black.
Several of the extremist channels active on Telegram belong to Patriot Front, a group that split off 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, whose former leader, Enrique Tarrio, is serving a 22-year sentence for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A study published this year by researchers from New York University and George Washington University identified 92 public Telegram channels with clear ties to the Proud Boys.
The researchers found that Proud Boys channels are primarily in the United States, but also in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany, constituting “the core of a tight-knit network with 131,953 subscribers.”
A rare instance of Telegram removing an extremist channel occurred in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, when at least 15 channels were banned, according to an NBC News tally at the time. But that crackdown proved to be the exception rather than the rule.
The more mainstream right-wing channels attract five- to six-figure followings.
Trump does not have a verified Telegram channel, but a channel in 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 over 452,000 subscribers on a verified channel. Carlson's verified channel has over 265,000 subscribers, and Greene's channel has over 86,000 subscribers.
Trump's longtime aides also have big clients.
Mike Lindell, founder of MyPillow and a prominent denier of the 2020 election results, runs a verified channel with over 111,000 subscribers where he posts a variety of content, including support for Trump, promotions for pillows, and paid partnerships for precious metals investments.
Another channel, with more than 191,000 subscribers, belongs to Michael Flynn, Trump's national security adviser, who was pardoned by President Trump after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about communications with Russian diplomats.