The messaging app Telegram has long been an engine of resistance and an annoyance for tyrants. Authoritarian leaders in Russia and Iran have tried to ban it. When protests broke out recently in Belarus and Hong Kong, Telegram was the glue that held democracy movements together in the face of violent onslaughts by powerful security services.
These days, though, Telegram is quickly becoming an online refuge for a different kind of resistance.
Far-right conspiracy theorists, racists and violent insurrectionists have been flocking to Telegram in recent weeks after being banished from the big American social media platforms following the storming of the Capitol building in Washington by a mob supporting President Donald J. Trump, who himself was cut off from Facebook and Twitter.
Twenty-five million new users flooded Telegram in the days after Twitter and Facebook, reacting to the Jan. 6 mayhem at the Capitol, purged users they deemed responsible for having incited violence or spread disinformation. The company’s founder, Pavel Durov, described it as “the largest digital migration in human history.”
The cascade of new users presents a new complication for Mr. Durov, who has positioned himself as an unambiguous ally of the street and free speech. He has promoted Telegram, which combines the features of Facebook and Twitter with encrypted messaging and a hands-off moderating philosophy, as a refuge for the oppressed.
With Washington and the rest of the United States on high alert after the Capitol violence, some fear that the features that make Telegram a popular tool for organizing resistance to authoritarian regimes could be used by the far right and extreme supporters of Mr. Trump to cause further mayhem. Already the F.B.I. has warned police chiefs across the country to be on the lookout for potential attacks by armed militia groups and racist extremists.
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“There’s a real push and pull between the people that are using Telegram — and messengers like it — for good, and the people who are using them to undermine democracy,” said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation analyst at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan research group. “We see the same openness and sense of connection that is used by democratic activists opportunistically exploited by extremists.”
Mr. Durov initially welcomed the influx of users and criticized the big American competitors for the expulsions, suggesting they were an effort to limit free speech. Last Monday, though, Mr. Durov announced that his team had blocked hundreds of posts from American channels calling for violence ahead of the presidential inauguration.
“For the last two weeks, the world has been following the events in the United States with concern,” Mr. Durov said in a post on his own Telegram channel. “While the US represents less than 2% of our user base, we at Telegram have also been watching the situation closely.”
Mr. Durov said that 94 percent of Telegram’s 25 million new users came from Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa.
Some have come to Telegram out of privacy fears after WhatsApp informed its customers that it was sharing information with its parent company, Facebook.
But many were refugees who had recently been banished from other services for posting extremist, insurrectionist views. The Proud Boys, a far-right militant group, directed new followers to chat groups on Telegram with names like Hate Facts and Murder the Media, and established right-wing accounts saw significant spikes in membership.
The platform got a boost on the right when Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, sent a message to his followers singing Telegram’s praises.
“Welcome, newcomers, to the darkest part of the web,” Mr. Tarrio wrote in a Telegram message. “You can be banned for spamming and porn. Everything else is fair game.”
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It is not the first time Telegram has had to contend with unsavory characters taking advantage of the same features that draw in democracy activists. After a similar crackdown by Twitter on Islamist radicals a few years ago, the Islamic State migrated to Telegram and used it to orchestrate terrorist attacks, spread propaganda and find recruits.
Several attacks in France were carried out by Islamic State militants who used Telegram’s encrypted chat function to coordinate their actions. When the French authorities sought information about the attackers from Mr. Durov, he replied that secrecy protocols made getting user information impossible, even for Telegram employees.
Mr. Durov, an extreme libertarian who is often described as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg, has for years faced off against the Kremlin’s efforts to silence him in his native Russia and now lives in self-imposed exile. He founded Telegram with his brother in 2013 as a digital outpost of free speech after the Kremlin stripped him of control over Vkontakte, a popular social media site he created as a Russian version of Facebook.
Telegram has no ads or outside investors and is funded almost entirely through Mr. Durov’s personal fortune. It is hosted on multiple servers spread around the world, ensuring that no one government can exercise total control over the service or gain access to information about its users.
“Telegram has never yielded to pressure from officials who wanted us to perform political censorship,” Mr. Durov wrote in an online missive a few years ago.
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As a resistance tool, it acts as a kind of social media Swiss Army knife, with a newsfeed similar to Facebook’s or Twitter’s for sharing uncensored information as well as an encrypted messenger service for secret communications.
Last August, when presidential election returns began to show that Belarus’s longtime dictator, Aleksandr Lukashenko, might have lost, his government quickly shut down the country’s communications infrastructure, targeting social media applications like WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook.
Telegram, too, faltered at first. But Mr. Durov quickly intervened, enabling what he called “anti-censorship tools” to keep Telegram running, probably including what is known as domain fronting, which disguises the source of online traffic.
