As soon as French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, the far-right landscape in the U.S. began to buzz with concern about losing its preferred communication platform.
Telegram, the messaging and social media app, is used for mainstream communication across much of Eastern Europe and other continents. But in the United States, Telegram is an outlier.
America’s far-right flocked to the app as traditional social media sites ramped up their content moderation in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, and its hands-off approach to content moderation has made it a refuge for extremists and conspiracy theorists of all kinds.
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Pavel’s arrest and charges in a wide range of crimes – related to Telegram’s alleged complicity in allowing users to trade in child pornography, drugs and money laundering – left those same users speculating about a possible upheaval.
“Telegram may go offline or decide to radically change as a result of this,” warned one Telegram channel for a chapter of the Proud Boys on Monday. “Does your PB chapter … have an alternative means of communication? Now would be the time to ensure that you do.”
Similar conversations are taking place across various extremist groups, said Joan Donovan, founder of the nonprofit The Critical Internet Studies Institute, who has been studying disinformation and incitement to violence on the platform.
“In the past few days, we’ve been tracking fear and paranoia that, now they’ve arrested the CEO, they’ll give up all the private information, and Telegram itself will be compromised,” Donovan said.
While the charges against Durov are serious, it’s far from clear whether it will have an impact on the day-to-day operation of the platform.
Adam Hadley, founder and executive director of the London-based nonprofit Tech Against Terrorism, noted that Telegram has faced significant challenges before, and overcome them.
“Telegram almost certainly will stay up,” Hadley said. While the founder is central to the app’s operation, Telegram is resilient, Hadley said. “It has survived many attacks on it by governments, so I would imagine it will just carry on running.”