We Need to Talk About Telegram
Image: motionstock via Pixabay
Russia’s war on information
TO MANY IN THE WEST THE WORD TELEGRAM MEANS NOTHING MORE THAN AN OUTDATED FORM OF MESSAGE STOP To many in Russia, it means a final bastion of truth. Telegram with a capital ‘T’ is a social media app that, unlike many of its counterparts in Russia, has avoided the swing of Putin’s sickle of censorship. Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Twitter’s content has been heavily restricted, while Facebook and Instagram have been banned entirely. But Telegram remains.
If the thought of not being able to use Facebook, Instagram or Twitter is scary enough for the average teenager in the UK, it is ten times more terrifying in Russia. The apps, targeted for breaching laws against ‘extremism’, were some of the few platforms in daily Russian life that worked to counter the state’s misinformation. Soon, independent news channels were not safe either. After the introduction of a law against ‘fake’ news that could see offenders jailed for up to 15 years, BBC Russia temporarily halted its operations. Meanwhile, one of Russia’s last independent news channels, Telekanal Dozhd, staged an on-air walkout when state pressure meant it had to cease broadcasting indefinitely. But still Telegram remained.
Telegram in the Russian context
The app, which boasts 500,000,000 users worldwide, is hugely popular in Russia and Ukraine, but has largely passed the West by. This is understandable in some ways. Firstly, its founder, Pavel Durov, is Russian, and was already known for creating another social media app that was huge in the Russian-speaking world but unknown elsewhere: VKontakte. Secondly, being primarily a messaging service, Telegram ostensibly doesn’t fulfill any needs that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger don’t already meet for Western users.
But it has one feature that meets a very pressing need for users in Russia. They can subscribe to ‘channels’, which Telegram describes as ‘tool[s] for broadcasting public messages to large audiences’. Increasingly, channels run by independent news outlets are one of the last sources of credible information on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Subscribers receive notifications every time they post but cannot respond or comment. This creates an ideal model for even the most timid seeker of truth in Putin’s war of misinformation. It provides the opportunity to blend in among hundreds of thousands of other users simply ‘subscribed’ to information Russia would desperately like them not to see.
At times, the Telegram posts extend beyond the standard reporting of facts. Ukraine has launched a Telegram channel to help relatives of missing and deceased Russian soldiers find their loved ones. Not only is this a humane move, but it also sheds light on the vast human costs from which ordinary Russians are shielded.
So why has Russia not censored Telegram? For starters, it has tried - and failed - before. In 2020, it lifted an official ban on the app after attempts at restricting access to it were unfruitful. The Russian state seems to have embraced the social media site now, too, and uses it to post updates on its own official channel.
Yes, the Russian state has its own Telegram channel. Unfortunately, Telegram’s lax censorship rules are as productive for the spread of misinformation as they are truth. Alongside Russian-language channels that share information on what really is happening in Ukraine, countless pro-Kremlin channels spread lies about things that really, really aren’t. If information has become a contested space in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Telegram is another battleground on which this conflict is playing out.
The Western perspective
Telegram’s relative obscurity in the West makes it unlikely that governments will pressure it to suppress misinformation like they have with Facebook and Twitter. Since Keir Starmer criticised the app’s ‘extremist content’ at Prime Minister’s Questions in October 2021, no action has been taken to combat any offensive or inaccurate material, even after February 24.
In an ideal situation, Western governments would come down hard on Telegram and force it to strictly moderate any inaccurate content. Outside of protest and petitions, however, there is little the average person outside of Russia can do to raise the profile of the topic.
Telegram channels, nonetheless, seem to be attempting to raise their own profile in the West as more and more English-language content appears on the app. The most notable example of this is the channel of President Zelenskyi himself, whose posts are written in English as well as Ukrainian.
Keeping informed in a war on disinformation remains the best countermeasure to malicious censorship. But the reality for ordinary people in Russia tells us that keeping informed of the truth is a privilege. It is a sad metaphor for the Russian situation that, while we in the West can largely access impartial news with ease, ordinary Russian citizens can only find truth on a platform littered with misinformation about a war they did not choose to start.
