Soon after the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, a warning, viewed more than 85,000 times, began circulating among the far right in Germany: “Back up your Telegram data as soon as possible and clear your account. “
The announcement came from Kim Dotcom, the German founder of the now-defunct digital piracy website Megaupload, who is due to be extradited from New Zealand and who knows a thing or two about the penalties for illegal internet activity.
Telegram users may have reason to fear after French authorities threw the book at Durov, accusing him of complicity in crimes that take place on the app, including sharing child pornography and drug dealing. If Durov can be held accountable for app crimes, so can the criminals who commit them, the logic goes.
Researchers at the German Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS) track about 3,000 channels and 2,000 groups linked to German 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 violating Germany’s strict criminal code. But a mass departure from the platform where groups have spent the past five years building a global infrastructure for radicalization and offline demonstrations would be tantamount to starting from scratch online.
Durov’s arrest is a shot at Telegram, which is now suddenly in the crosshairs of European law enforcement and regulators. Neo-Nazis’ favorite app detects an existential threat, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it.
“Bridge Technology”
Alarm spread quickly on Saturday at Durov’s arrest. Just 90 minutes after French media reported that Durov’s private jet had been intercepted by authorities at Paris’ Le Bourget airport, a far-right channel posted that his arrest “may have political reasons and is a tool to gain access to the personal data of Telegram users.”
The channel is associated with the Reichsbürger movement, which believes that Germany is not a sovereign state and is still occupied by the Allied Powers. German police foiled their 2022 coup plot, discovering a cache of more than $500,000 in gold and cash, as well as hundreds of guns, knives, ballistic helmets and ammunition.
Similar messages started circulating on the app. Last night Austrian extremist Martin Sellner wrote – the translation here is via Google Translate – that “the ‘liberal West’ excludes the simulation of democracy. All communication channels may soon collapse. Will Musk be arrested next time?” The message has been viewed more than 40,000 times, according to TGStat, a Telegram analytics tool that provides the view count cited in this story.
