Since last March 24 Russia decided to launch its military invasion of neighboring Ukraine, Telegram has been dragged down by the armed conflict. Citizens of both countries are using this instant messaging application en masse to find out about the war and trying to get around censorship, but despite its growing popularity, the platform is also drawing suspicion for allowing propagandistic disinformation on both sides of the front lines and for being less secure than it appears.
In much of the world, WhatsApp is the most used platform to communicate. This is not the case in Russia and Ukraine, where Telegram has been standing out for years in big cities. The war has accentuated that use. Many Ukrainians flock to this app as a means of constant information, being able to follow the channels through which they communicate from its president, Volódimir Zelenski, to journalists on the ground. But it is also very popular in Russia, where 63% of Russians use it as an alternative source to media controlled or linked to the Kremlin.
Neither so free nor so safe
Telegram is not immune to problems. With 500 million active users per month and just 30 employees, the platform is sold as a space to communicate without censorship or interference from governments: it has repeatedly refused to give its users data to Moscow and has continued to function despite the fact that the Kremlin tried to ban it. Even so, this communicative freedom and the limited moderation of the contents have opened the door to propaganda and misinformation. The proliferation of hoaxes on the covid-19 already highlighted a problem that is being repeated with the war.
Telegram also ensures that it is a secure app that guarantees privacy, something essential in the midst of escalating warfare. But there are some doubts about that point, since it collects certain personal data that “could reveal” the identity of the user, according to a report from the National Cryptologic Center in 2017. Also, only “secret chats” are encrypted, while other conversations are stored in the cloud. “There is a significant risk of insider threat or ‘hacking’ that could expose all those chats to the Russian government”, warned Eva Galperin, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Groups can hold up to 200,000 users.
One of the personalities who has criticized these failures the most is Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal, considered the safest messaging application in the world for its encryption of communications that makes them impossible to intercept and for its minimal collection of personal data. Doubts about Telegram are leading more and more Ukrainians to switch to Signal.
A founder persecuted by Putin
Telegram has no ties to Moscow, although it does have a turbulent past. The app was founded in 2013 by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, originally from St. Petersburg. The second is quite a personality in Russia. At the age of 22, he founded Vkontakte (VK), a Russian version of Facebook that quickly became the most popular social network in the country., but also from Ukraine. Dubbed by some means as the Mark Zuckerberg Russian for his prolific career, Durov’s fortune amounts to 14,000 million euroswhich places him among the ten richest people in Russia and number 112 in the world ranking, according to Forbes.
However, that success was cut short by his refusal to dance to the sound of Vladimir Putin. With a Western profile, Durov had created with VK a social platform with such power for freedom of expression that it could pose a threat to Moscow’s interests. A) Yes, the Kremlin pressured the app for years, demanding that it remove the publications of opposition groups or give personal data of its users to the government.
In 2014, the FSB – the Russian security agency heir to the KGB – asked Durov to help identify those who were demonstrating in Ukraine against the pro-Russian president. Viktor Yanukovychwho would end up being deposed as a result of the revolt of the Maidán. The businessman’s refusal cost him his job. “I refused to comply with these demands. I lost my company and my house, but I would do it again without hesitation, ”he explained in mid-March in a publication on his Telegram channel. VK came to be controlled by businessmen close to the Russian government.
Aware that he was an awkward person, a year before Durov created Telegram and legally registered his new company in the British Virgin Islands, far from the tentacles of the Kremlin. After his expulsion from VK, at just 30 years old, the technologist escaped from Russia and acquired citizenship of the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts and Nevis, which has allowed him to travel around the world and change his residence. He currently resides in Dubai.
Durov is a cyberlibertarian who believes in technology as a tool for liberation. That is why he has been financing the operation of Telegram out of his pocket for almost a decade. Still, he knows that his creation can also be instrumentalized for much less ethical ends. This is what is happening in Ukraine. “Channels are increasingly becoming an unverified source of information,” he warned. “I ask Russian and Ukrainian users to be wary of any data being spread on Telegram at this time.”