Shortly after the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, a warning, which was viewed more than 85,000 times, began circulating among Germany’s far right: “Back up your Telegram data as quickly as possible and clean up your account.”
The message came from Kim Dotcom, the embattled German founder of the now-defunct digital piracy website Megaupload, who is set to be extradited from New Zealand and knows a thing or two about facing penalties for illegal internet activity.
Telegram users may have reason to fear after French authorities pinned the blame on Durov, accusing him of complicity in crimes taking place on the app, including sharing child pornography and drug trafficking. If Durov can be held responsible for crimes committed on the app, so too can the criminals who perpetrate them, the logic goes.
Researchers at the German Centre for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS) are tracking around 3,000 channels and 2,000 groups linked to Germany’s far-right and conspiracy movements. Users are known to post racist and anti-Semitic hate speech and some groups contain Nazi symbols, Holocaust denial and calls for violence, openly flouting Germany’s strict criminal code. But a mass exodus from the platform, where groups have spent the past five years building a global infrastructure for offline radicalisation and demonstrations, would be tantamount to starting from scratch online.
“If you’re a terrorist or an extremist, you’re going to take the path of least resistance, and in this particular case, that probably means Telegram,” Adam Hadley, founder and CEO of the UN-backed organization Tech Against Terrorism, tells WIRED.
Durov’s arrest is a warning to Telegram, which suddenly finds itself in the crosshairs of European authorities and regulators. The neo-Nazis’ favourite app is facing an existential threat and they are not quite sure what to do about it.
A ‘Bridge Technology’
On Saturday, alarm quickly spread over Durov’s arrest. Just 90 minutes after French media reported that authorities had intercepted Durov’s private plane at Paris’ Le Bourget airport, a far-right channel posted that his arrest “may be politically motivated and a tool to access the personal data of Telegram users.”
The channel is associated with The Reichsbürger movementwhich considers Germany not to be a sovereign state and that it remains occupied by the Allied powers. German police foiled their coup plot in 2022, discovering a cache of more than half a million dollars in gold and cash and hundreds of guns, knives, ballistic helmets and ammunition.
Similar messages began to proliferate on the app. That night, Austrian extremist Martin Sellner He wrote (the translation here is via Google’s translation tool) that “the ‘liberal West’ is shutting down the simulation of democracy. All communication channels may soon collapse. Will Musk be the next to be arrested?” The message was viewed more than 40,000 times, according to estimates by TGStat, a Telegram analytics tool, which provided the view counts cited in this story.
Sellner was banned from entering Germany in March for being the keynote speaker at the infamous AFD conference on November 1. Potsdam ConferenceThere he presented members of Germany’s rising far-right party with a plan to carry out mass deportations once it comes to power. The AfD emerged victorious on Sunday in a state election in the former east, giving the far right a historic first since World War II.
