An arms race to truth: Bad actors luring youth on Telegram

Telegram, one of the world’s most used online messaging apps, is facing controversy after company founder Pavel Durov said in an interview that the app employs only around 30 engineers. That comment, made in an April 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, raised concerns about Telegram’s underinvestment in user privacy and security.

Telegram is known for its encrypted messaging and is used by individuals, businesses, and governments worldwide, with approximately 800 million monthly active users and over 2 billion total downloads—meaning that security problems resulting from lack of manpower could have widespread consequences.

It’s not just the admitted lack of employees that’s gotten Telegram into hot water recently. Telegram’s moderation policies have been lax since the app’s conception, and the app’s privacy and encryption policies are known to attract groups looking to spread hateful content. The platform has faced issues of misinformation and hate speech, especially antisemitic speech following October 7, 2023.

According to the Telegram website, the app uses a “combination of AI-driven and manual moderation” to counter misuse of the platform. “We will always favor the least restrictive measure possible to sustain a safe digital environment and decisively address malicious content,” the online statement said.

Promotion of violence on Telegram

Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Long War Journal, told The Media Line that Telegram has resisted restricting the spread of content promoting violence.

“Hamas, for instance, has circulated violent videos showcasing attacks on civilians and Israeli troops via its Telegram channels,” Truzman said.

As far back as the 2014 Gaza war, Hamas and other armed groups used social media to share real-time videos and messages from Gaza.

Several of Telegram’s features lend itself to use by bad actors, including end-to-end encryption, limited moderation, support for large groups, and the ability to prevent screenshots.

“Palestinian terrorist organizations have demonstrated remarkable sophistication in their use of these platforms,” Truzman said. “Today, channels like Telegram are frequently employed to release videos of attacks and official statements from these groups.”

Shmuel Gihon, research team leader at the Israeli digital risk platform Cyberint, told The Media Line that Telegram’s commitment to anonymity and free speech “makes it both an amazing platform and a perfect platform to perform malicious acts and spread misinformation.”

He said that Telegram has “the worst content moderation out of the platforms available.”

Since October 7, the platform has been used to anonymously spread anti-Israel misinformation about the Gaza war, Gihon said.

A brief investigation by The Media Line found active Telegram channels promoting pro-Palestine student encampments at universities in New York, Texas, and Washington, DC. Some fliers shared in the group had designs featuring the Hezbollah flag. Groups also featured a call to protest New York’s Nova Exhibition, an installation detailing the Hamas massacre at the Nova music festival.

One example of a Telegram channel that promotes violent content is the Resistance News Network (RNN). According to the Anti-Defamation League, RNN is a radical antisemitic, anti-Zionist channel that promotes violence against Israel. Launched in October 2022, RNN has over 165,000 subscribers and claims to have been deplatformed from Instagram and Twitter (now X). The channel shares content from US State Department-designated foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), including Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. RNN’s posts include propaganda and graphics of armed individuals and rocket attacks on Israel. In February 2024, RNN materials appeared offline at the Auraria Campus in Denver. Groups sharing RNN content include Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at various universities, The Mapping Project, Samidoun, and Jewish Voice for Peace Metro DC. RNN’s toolkit promoting pro-Hamas propaganda was found on UConn’s Telegram group UCommune.

Officially, Hamas has been banned from major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, yet content supporting the group continues to reach large audiences online. Accounts sympathetic to Hamas have gained significant followings since the conflict with Israel began on October 7. A Telegram channel named Gaza Now, aligned with Hamas, saw its followers increase from 340,000 to over 1.8 million. This channel distributes Hamas propaganda and gruesome content. Mainstream platforms attempt to limit extremist content, but Telegram remains a key outlet for violent pro-Hamas messaging. Efforts to moderate such content are complicated, with platforms struggling to balance policy enforcement and the spread of false information. As social media companies grapple with these challenges, they often face criticism for both overzealous and insufficient content moderation measures.

In order to make the misinformation more palatable, people posting anti-Israel content on social media use emotionally driven language that appeals to users’ preexisting beliefs, Gihon said.

Such language was evident in the content found by The Media Line in these channels, including in claims that Israel operates “torture camps for children.” One post showed a fake screenshot of an Israeli news agency showing purported Israeli support for raping Palestinians. Other posts showed graphic photos of child victims of the Syrian civil war, falsely claiming that the subjects were Palestinian children in Gaza.

Many posts were shared in multiple channels or included hyperlinks directing recipients of forwarded messages back to the original Telegram group. These methods increase the misinformation’s reach.

Gihon said that “funded channels” are spreading anti-Israel misinformation in an attempt to influence groups such as university students.

In rare cases, Telegram does respond to abusive content shared on its platform. In 2015, the platform shut down 78 channels related to the Islamic State (IS) group after the Middle East Media Research Institute called attention to the spread of IS propaganda on Telegram. In 2022, the app banned 64 accounts at Germany’s request for spreading extremist content and COVID-19 disinformation.

Following October 7, Telegram took some steps to limit the spread of content by groups connected to Hamas, but only after Google and Apple intervened, Truzman said.

He accused Telegram of facilitating the spread of anti-Israel misinformation to Western audiences.

Some Telegram channels have similarly been used to share support for anti-Hindu hate crimes in Bangladesh, promoting the message that the Muslim attackers were “freeing Bangladesh from its last colonialists.”

Hamas and other armed groups also use social media to recruit local supporters, including recruitment of children to Hamas-run summer camps. But Gihon said that terrorist groups see social media as better used for influencing international audiences, “especially given that local populations also have their local news and their surroundings to better judge for themselves the information being spread.”

He said that some state actors use Telegram both to gain support among well-meaning Westerners and to carry out concealed state-sponsored espionage.

The Media Line was able to quickly confirm that some anti-Israel Telegram channels are used to target specific individuals and organizations. Posts shared in these groups listed individuals’ names, places of employment, phone numbers, and more, alongside calls to silence members of the lists or flood their online presence with antisemitic content. Targeted individuals included performers, mayors, police officers, and board members at universities.

Telegram groups can include up to 200,000 members, and Telegram channels have an unlimited audience. Messages shared in one Telegram group can quickly spread, allowing for the efficient dissemination of propaganda and misinformation.

Given Telegram’s commitment to anonymity and free speech, experts don’t expect Telegram to emulate Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, or X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, in the field of content moderation.

“Technological solutions will be the identification of bot activity and bot accounts in the more mainstream platforms such as Meta, Instagram, TikTok, and X,” Gihon said. “When it comes to Telegram, I don’t think there is a solution to this issue, other than for stakeholders to put in the work to expose the use of Telegram as a platform that is being leveraged with malicious intentions.”

Some countries have banned Telegram, but that move hasn’t been particularly effective.

According to the Trust and Safety Foundation (TSF), an organization that tracks online hate speech and misinformation, users looking to share hate speech or promote violence often switch social media platforms once one platform shuts down or introduces moderation.

Around the January 6 US Capitol attack, Amazon refused to continue hosting Parler, a microblogging site favored by the far right, leading millions of users to switch to Telegram, TSF said. That influx of former Parler users helped Telegram reach 500 million active users.

Uri Klempner, a cyber politics graduate at Tel Aviv University who has published work on Telegram’s hate speech problem, explained to The Media Line that “the prevalence of these groups on Telegram is actually a byproduct of attempts to combat their spread on what we consider the mainstream internet. Policies of ‘de-platforming’ extremist groups from mainstream platforms drove them toward more ‘tolerant’ platforms such as Telegram. What we see now is a significant improvement in these groups’ ability to control information and convey their narratives.”

Many users, especially in the Arab world, use Telegram as a primary source of news and information. Due to the app’s broad audience reach, it is becoming a major asset in gaining public legitimacy and controlling narratives.

According to Klempner, “Terror groups have accustomed audiences to that by using their channels as the primary form of communication. This is an unprecedented normalization of consuming terrorist-produced content and information, which inherently is extremist and borderline propaganda in many cases. It is a concerning tool for coordination of extremism—recruitment, operations, and more.”

Experts like Gihon and Klempner see this situation as equivalent to an arms race to the truth. With new moderation tools unlikely to be rolled out and state bans ineffective, accurate information is the best way to fight fake news on Telegram, Gihon said.

“It’s pretty obvious that anti-Israeli entities worldwide are winning this race,” he said. “To mitigate and counter it, Israel should put a lot of funds and efforts into spreading the truth regarding these claims and issues.”

“Telegram as a platform is unfortunately not that concerned with regulating this content, as its founder and CEO Pavel Durov has made clear many times,” said Klempner.

According to him, Telegram often downplays the radicalizing potential of these channels. “In October 2023, when they were under a lot of pressure to take down Hamas-affiliated channels, they defended keeping them up as they could serve as an important channel to convey important information.”

In a statement from October 23, Durov stated, "Hamas used Telegram to warn civilians in Ashkelon to leave the area ahead of their missile strikes. Would shutting down their channel help save lives—or would it endanger more lives?"

“I think this statement is facetious, ignoring the fact that this warning was, in fact, psychological terror and had nothing to do with humanitarian concern. I find it hard to believe Durov is not aware of that and is simply trying to create excuses to allow extremist content on his platform. Ultimately, the solution lies with them. There is obviously a much larger debate on the effectiveness of de-platforming as a practice, but pressure needs to be put on Telegram to take its role more seriously as it emerges as a platform that significantly alters and impacts public discourse,” Klempner concluded.

Gihon has called for investigations into the funders of online anti-Israel misinformation, which he said might include the Iranian government, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

Ultimately, it’s up to Telegram users to protect themselves from misinformation, Gihon said. “We should be extra careful and aware of the reputation of the platforms that we use in our daily lives,” he said. “Critical thinking is key, especially when we get our content from Telegram.”

Sam Baeza contributed to this report.