In the aftermath of last week’s storming of the Capitol, during which Donald Trump supporters attempted to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, tech platforms have taken unprecedented steps to ban the kinds of far-right activists and organizers involved in the attack. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were used by the pro-Trump mob as their online staging ground, leading the networks to institute stricter measures to avoid culpability in future extremist organizing. But Trump’s most rabid followers and other far-right Americans are already evolving, as they move to other online spaces to stay connected and curb the effects of the purge.
Telegram, a Dubai-based encrypted messaging app, is experiencing a surge in popularity, including with far-right users. It is by no means a one-to-one replacement for the easily accessible and open forums provided by Twitter and Facebook, but Telegram does allow users to communicate en masse via group or individual private-messaging channels. This pivot to subterranean online networks gives shunned far-right hordes relative privacy and anonymity, and has enabled them to speak freely in ways that are more difficult on mainstream social networks due to more active moderation of violent, racist, or otherwise threatening speech.
And far-right Telegram channels are already growing. By Monday morning, one notable QAnon channel’s membership count had ballooned to 35,000 members, “a sharp increase“ from a few weeks prior, according to Axios. NBC News has also reported that right-wing extremists are using Telegram to call for violence against government officials on Inauguration Day next week. On one now deleted channel hosting white supremacist content, which labeled itself as “eco-fascist,” NBC found that users were sharing military manuals on bomb and munition making. This unwelcome ideological rise has led the messaging app to ban at least 15 far-right Telegram channels and censor content on several others, according to an NBC tally.
However, Telegram is not the only stable and secure messaging resource available to the far-right. The chat app Signal functions in a way that is very similar to Telegram—offering users anonymity and security—and is also seeing an unprecedented boost in downloads in the wake of the purge of far-right content from mainstream social networks. (Though, Signal and Telegram, which both recently became the top free downloads in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, also seem to be benefitting from a declining growth in users on Facebook-owned competitor WhatsApp over data-privacy concerns.) Brian Acton, a cofounder of WhatsApp and one of the Signal Foundation’s primary funders, has described the messaging app as a way to make “private communication accessible and ubiquitous.” Over the summer, Black Lives Matter activists relied on such privacy tools, as Signal downloads surged during the height of the summer protest movement. And following the Capitol assault and Trump’s ban from Facebook and Twitter, Forbes noted Wednesday that right-wing activists now seem to be flocking to it, in part, due to similar privacy needs that the racial-justice protesters in BLM took advantage of. Namely, it allows users to clandestinely organize and communicate en masse with less of a risk that they will be booted offline due to content violations or that Signal will report their messages to police. As of now, Forbes points out, it seems that Signal has no way to monitor users’ messages in a way that could help law enforcement investigations. Among the app’s new wave of users are the Boogaloo Boys, an anti-government extremist movement whose members already started using Signal, as well as Telegram, to help organize future rallies, per The New York Times. (Signal’s Acton and a spokesperson for Telegram founder Pavel Duro did not respond to comment requests from Forbes).
So, despite the recent crackdown, far-right groups are finding ways to maintain an online presence albeit on more obscure, harder-to-find forums. Among them are Parler, the far-right’s answer to Twitter, which reached the number one spot on the App Store before Apple banned it from the marketplace and it went totally dark due to Amazon Web Services terminating its hosting agreement. There’s also Gab, another right-wing Twitter alternative; MeWe, a site similar to Facebook; and Rumble, a video-hosting site akin to YouTube said to be popular with conspiracy theorists. According to data accumulated by Apptopia and published by Axios on Tuesday, over the preceding week, the download numbers for MeWe more than tripled and Rumble’s more than doubled; between January 5 and January 10, Telegram downloads more than doubled and Signal saw its downloads grow eight-fold.
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