Messaging, often misused as very secure, attracts militants from all overflows, including the most extremes.
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This is where coordinate, without crossing, the activists of IT Army Ukrainian, who attack the official Russian sites, the propagandists of the Kremlin or the activists of Europe Ecology-the Greens, of reconquest ! or the Republic in March (LRM). Telegram, the instant messaging that also allows to create public or private discussion channels, has become in a few years a popular tool, activists, and certain governments.
This atypical platform, which claims more than 500 million d Users in the world , acts as a moth for all political movements in the broad sense. Dozens of “response” groups, the name given by most French parties to groups used to coordinate the action of their activists, rubbed themselves in recent weeks of the “Convoy of Freedom”, “yellow vests “or the most violent far right.
Some clicks are enough to find a Russian propaganda channel with 350,000 subscribers, or neonazis, complocity or sectarian groups (in French), which sometimes bring together tens of thousands of registrants. The reason is simple: Telegram does not moderate, or little. There is no way to report content and, if it is possible to report a discussion channel as a whole, the deletions y are extremely rare . Just the company was blocked, at the beginning of March, the display in Europe of the official accounts of RT and Sputnik, the Russian media targeted by prohibitions throughout the European Union. As for Brazil, in March, it is only under the threat of total blockage that society has Finally consented to monitor the country’s hundred canals.
This lack of moderation is, to resume a popular expression in the start-up medium, “not a bug, but a functionality”: it is even the main source of the growth of the application. Over the years, it allowed it to attract the users banned from other major platforms, which thanks to it did not need to resort to complex solutions, or very limited in audience as in features. The militants of the community conspiracy Qanon, largely hunted with Facebook, thus found a convenient refuge, just like various neonazis groups, present long-standing on the platform and who appreciate as much his lack of moderation as the fact that , unlike Meta, it is not “led by a Jewish CEO”.
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