Telegram and the "publisher" double standard

ALSO: The Spectator, finally, finds a buyer

I have a basic rule: any adult man who has the Snapchat app on his phone, over the age of 30, is worth keeping an eye on.

This is a view I’ve maintained for a few years but it probably seems a little passé now. After all, Snapchat – or Snap – has become one of the world’s biggest messaging apps. There are now over 800m global Snapchat users, including 200m in India and more than 100m in the US. So even though I still think of it as a platform for Gen Z to cyber-bully or sext one another, that’s probably not true. But that air of suspicion lingers. And it adheres even more strongly to Telegram.

That app has been in the news recently following the arrest of one of its founders, Pavel Durov. Alongside his brother Nikolai, Durov launched Telegram in 2013, following a successful, but fraught, exit from Russian social media site VK. The stated intent of Telegram – which is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and Dubai – was to create a messaging platform that was free from state interference or surveillance. The Durovs had a frosty relationship with the Russian authorities, and the exit from VK – and the country – was precipitated by a bust-up over the social pages of political dissident Alexei Navalny. “I’m afraid there is no going back,” Durov told TechCrunch after his 2014 departure, “not after I publicly refused to cooperate with the authorities. They can’t stand me.”

And yet, when Durov was arrested by French authorities at Paris-Le Bourget Airport last month, it wasn’t perceived as a sop to the Kremlin. It is a symbol of the changing dynamics of “free speech” in the West that Durov, so long a symbol of resistance to totalitarianism, has become a flag-bearer for a specific form of anti-democratic insubordination. The French indictment censured Durov for “complicity in criminal activity”, with the 12 charges focusing on the use of Durov’s platform for the dissemination of child exploitation material and drugs trafficking.

There’s a lot to unpack in this story, not least a perceived double-standard. One of the biggest questions of the internet era is the extent to which social media platforms are seen as publishers. Are they responsible for the material added to their platform if they do not curate or moderate that content? Can they permit the spread of mateiral, willy nilly, if they are not willing to curate or moderate? How do you maintain an open forum if you are held legally culpable for that openness? The assumption of responsibility as a publisher is something that has been fought, fiercely, by Meta and Twitter and all the other social media sites. But this is precisely what Durov and Telegram are facing: “complicity” with the actions of their users.

The question is whether there is something substantively different about Telegram, when compared to its peers. Here in the UK, we’ve done a lot of soul-searching in recent weeks about the interplay between social media and violent insurrection. The streets of several towns and cities – from Southport, where 3 children were murdered in a knife attack, to Plymouth, Belfast and Bristol – were rocked by a form of far-right, anti-immigration violence. It raises many questions about the integrity of Britain’s fraying social fabric, but one of the key points is: how did the unrest spread? How was it organised?

A map of incidences of unrest, during the 2024 UK riots

Elon Musk, who has traditionally been extremely defensive about the role that Twitter plays as a “publisher”, tweeted, on 4 August, that "Civil war is inevitable." This is what we might call flame-fanning; a transparent attempt to add fuel to the fire. But there’s no world in which someone writing “civil war is inevitable” could be held accountable – in the manner Durov has – for the response. And Musk’s incendiary comments were no different to thousands of others posted on his platform, or over on Facebook (where equally extreme content is distributed, often in narrower silos), or in dozens of op-eds in tabloid newspapers. No, there’s never going to be an inquiry which can satisfy the burden of proof that X led to Y.

But if a messaging system is used in order to spread information such as “THIS LOCATION IS A HOTEL USED TO HOUSE ASYLUM SEEKERS” or “WE ARE MEETING AT THIS LOCATION AT THIS TIME” then the calculation changes. Clearly, there is a cause and effect here in terms of subsequent violence. All mass violence involves a degree of organisation – sometimes that’s spontaneous, sometimes it’s calculated. While Twitter was accused of boosting the unrest, Telegram was more directly implicated in the organisation. Following reporting in WIRED, Telegram – a platform that prides itself on soft-touch moderation – took down a channel called “SOUTHPORT WAKE UP” which was being used to spread dangerous misinformation during the unrest. This scrutiny came just days before Durov’s arrest.

The arrest is not linked to Telegram’s role in the August of discontent here in the UK. It is linked to a perception that Telegram is an app that is used, first and foremost, for activities that circumvent the law or are outright illegal. The difference between an app like Telegram and an app like Discord might seem quite academic – after all, both have a reputation for being sketchy – but there’s quite a substantial distinction. Discord is a voice and text chat that has been primarily marketed towards the video game community. The fact that it is, transparently, used for the sharing of pornography, crypto laundering and other fringe or illegal activities is, therefore, secondary. If you see someone has the Discord app on their phone, the odds are that they’re probably just a gamer.

Why do you have the Telegram app though? The truth is that despite its relatively benign origins – the Durovs, after all, wanted to create a truly free, truly private, chat service – Telegram has become a nefarious app. It has undoubtedly become a platform that plays a key role in the distribution of content involving the exploitation of minors (or animals, if you have been following the case of Adam Britton, the crocodile expert who mutilated and murdered dogs for the enjoyment of other sickos), as well as for selling and purchasing drugs and weapons. And there just isn’t really a more socially acceptable reason to use the app. Of course, some people will argue that they use it due to privacy concerns, because they want to maintain the primary of freedom of speech. But that’s quite a hard argument to sustain, given both the alternatives and the overwhelming flow of content on the platform.

But the fact that Durov is being indicted and Mark Zuckerberg isn’t (Meta has been implicated in the spread of child exploitation material, even though they have more stringent protocols on the matter) will undoubtedly create a sense of technological stratification. Zuckerberg and Meta play ball with the authorities and so they are not considered complicit in the crimes on the platform; the Durovs don’t suck up to any state actors, and so get charged with complicity. There is something in that. After all, companies like Meta (WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted and used A LOT in the drugs industry, not to mention being utilised, again, in child pornography cases such as the biggest scandal to hit the BBC in recent years) and Apple (who wouldn’t unlock the San Bernardino terrorists’ iPhones) also create environments that are conducive to crime. Yet Zuckerberg and Tim Cook don’t fear arrest when they step off a plane (I’m sure they haven’t flown commercial in years).

It is a balance. “Privacy” is an important selling point and something that can be used in marketing material; “secrecy” gets you put on a watchlist. “Freedom of speech” is enshrined in the law and defended by every tech company, but “hate speech” isn’t part of that. Every site wants to add a “marketplace” dynamic – but they want to sell rip-off versions of consumer products that put mom-and-pop stores out of business, not drugs or handguns or videos involving kittens and a vacuum cleaner.

The fundamental mistake of Telegram is to miss the iceberg dynamics of social media. Facebook is a vast rock of ice bobbing in the North Atlantic. We know there’s more under the water, but there’s plenty going on above the surface to keep our attention and avoid a crash. Twitter is a more classical ’berg: 10% nice normal jokes, 90% weird OnlyFans shilling. But Telegram gets the ratio wrong. What’s on the surface? Just a dark shadow – the hint of something – but nothing more. And under the water? Jagged, Titanic-destroying, shards of ice.

After the paywall: a little note on the apparent sale of my alma mater (if that’s the right term), The Spectator.