Some far-right extremists have fled Telegram in search of a new refuge: SimpleX, a messaging service that just raised more than $1 million in funding with the help of Jack Dorsey, once the CEO of Twitter, now known like X.
The migration from Telegram began after the app’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov announced a crackdown on illegal content and cooperation with requests from authorities. Just a few weeks ago, Durov was arrested in France on a series of charges alleging that Telegram helped spread child sexual abuse material and encouraged criminal activity among its users.
Some of those users are far-right extremists who are now openly nervous about using the app and have turned to SimpleX, an obscure secure messaging app that promises unparalleled privacy and encryption options.
The app is perceived as a more secure alternative and is consequently gaining momentum, because it does not require any user authentication or identification in the form of email or phone number, which, according to SimpleX, “radically improves your privacy.”
On its website, SimpleX claims that it cannot track “your profile, contacts and metadata” by hiding it from its own servers, admitting: “We don’t know how many people use our SimpleX servers.”
Even use the example from a Mauritanian who was wrongfully imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for “calling a family member in Afghanistan” and says SimpleX protects against such guilt by association by protecting “the privacy of our personal networks.”
Steven Rai, analyst at Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD)He said several extremists he monitors could see the advantages of replacing Telegram with SimpleX.
“SimpleX has numerous security features that extremists consider advantageous compared to Telegram: in addition to having end-to-end encryption activated by default for all messages, it boasts of being the first chat platform that avoids the need to identify to users,” he said. .
Rai continued: “On most social media platforms like Telegram, accounts are assigned a unique identifier that remains static even when users change their display name, allowing authorities and other investigators to track them in the time and space, discover who they are communicating with. with them and possibly identify them.”
All of these features combined became a selling point for far-right extremists to start downloading SimpleX, which has the option for one-to-one messaging and broader chat groups, similar to Telegram.
“Nothing is bulletproof,” said one far-right user in a discussion on SimpleX about how the app was better than Telegram, “but (SimpleX) doesn’t need your email or phone number (unlike Telegram and the like). ) and not store chats on your server.”
In August, the company announced more than 100,000 downloads of its Android app and that it “raised a $1.3 million seed round of funding” led by Dorsey and a Boston-based venture capital firm.
“Jack, we are very lucky to have your support and investment,” the company said in a online press release. “Thank you for believing in our ability to build a better messaging network!”
Dorsey had praised SimpleX in X in 2023, calling the application “promising” and potentially better than Signal, a well-known secure messaging application considered the gold standard among privacy experts.
Neither SimpleX nor one of Dorsey’s business email addressesresponded to an emailed request for comment.
When Durov was arrested, many analysts wondered if Telegram would see a drop in users among what is known as Terrorgram, a designated terrorist entity in the United Kingdom that makes a living off the app. Terrorgram, with online agents around the world, promotes terrorism and provides a list of targets to its followers.
But Terrorgram-adjacent propagandists immediately published a list of at least 24 channels that were present on SimpleX. Some of those new SimpleX channels, mirroring Terrorgram, are increasing membership numbers into the hundreds.
“(Telegram) is a surveillance tool, always was and always will be,” one extremist user wrote in an open chat group on SimpleX after migrating there recently. “Don’t trust it.”
In another neo-Nazi chat group on an extremist channel once on Telegram, users discussed SimpleX as a shiny new opportunity.
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“It’s trustworthy,” said one user before another with a handle inspired by the Third Reich began denouncing Signal.
“The problem with Signal is that, although it is a non-profit company, a huge sum of its finances comes from the united states government agency”said the user on SimpleX. “Pinching them is a matter of time.” Signal was founded with a grant from a nonprofit government organization, but has started using donations to cover your expenses.
SimpleX founder Evgeny Poberezkin is based in the UK, as is another of its listed founders. according to LinkedIn.
The Base, a designated neo-Nazi terrorist organization in several countries and several of whose members were recently arrested in the Netherlands, has already appeared on the messaging app posting propaganda and contact information. The Base’s Russia-based founder announced the group’s VK account, the Russian version of Facebook founded by Durov, on SimpleX.
“Far-right propagandists have been looking for an alternative to Telegram for several years,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst at the Anti-extremism projectwho first alerted The Guardian to the SimpleX migration of far-right extremists. “This is the most significant platform change to date for these specific, extreme, privacy-focused online white supremacist communities.”
Fisher-Birch said paranoia among neo-Nazi-aligned Telegram channels and the need to find an alternative to that app spiked when U.S. authorities announced the arrests in September of two of Terrorgram’s top U.S. agents.
“If these current channels are allowed to remain on the SimpleX platform, it will likely signal to others that the platform is safe and a good alternative,” he said.
The almost “Whac-A-Mole” game of chasing extremists on alternative social media apps is a long lasting problem among national security officials trying to limit the online activities of terrorist organizations. During its peak in 2014, the Islamic State used everything from the question-and-answer site Ask.Fm to Facebook, Instagram and X as recruiting sites.
Larger app bans led to Telegram eventually becoming the platform of choice for most terrorist groups looking to find new members. Things began to change as the Dubai-based app came under increasing public scrutiny. Already in May 2023, ISIS members noted that SimpleX could be a new haven for the covert organization.
TO senior research advisor Working with one of the Canadian government’s national security departments, I also noticed extremists of all stripes moving to SimpleX in an all-too-familiar migration pattern.
“The migration of terrorists and violent extremists between online platforms is not exclusive to Telegram,” wrote Marc-André Argentino in your substack. “For terrorists and violent extremists looking to avoid detection, SimpleX Chat offers significant advantages over Telegram, largely due to its design and features that prioritize privacy and anonymity.”
