Soon after the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, a warning that was viewed more than 85,000 times started circulating among Germany’s far right: “Back up your Telegram data as quickly as you can and clean your account.”
The message came from Kim Dotcom, the embattled German founder of the now-defunct digital piracy website Megaupload who is set to be extradited from New Zealand, and who knows a thing or two about facing penalties for illegal activity on the internet.
Telegram users may have reason to fear after French authorities threw the book at Durov, charging him with complicity in crimes that take place on the app, including the sharing of child pornography and the trading of narcotics. If Durov can be held liable for crimes on the app, so too can the criminals perpetrating them, the logic goes.
Researchers at Germany’s Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS) track around 3,000 channels and 2,000 groups linked to the German far right and conspiracy movements. Users are known to post racist and antisemitic hate speech, and some groups contain Nazi symbols, Holocaust denial, and calls to violence, openly flouting Germany’s strict criminal code. But a mass exodus 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.
“If you’re a terrorist or you’re an extremist, you’re going to follow the path of least resistance, and in this particular case, that probably means Telegram,” Adam Hadley, the founder and executive director of the United Nations–backed organization Tech Against Terrorism, tells WIRED.
Durov’s arrest is a shot across the bow for Telegram, which now suddenly finds itself in the sights of European law enforcement and regulators. Neo-Nazis’ favorite app is staring down an existential threat, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it.
A ‘Bridge Technology’
Alarm spread quickly the Saturday of 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 be a tool to gain access to personal data of Telegram users.”
The channel is associated with the Reichsbürger movement, which believes Germany is not a sovereign state and is still occupied by Allied powers. German police thwarted their coup plot in 2022, discovering a cache of more than $500,000 in gold and cash, as well as hundreds of guns, knives, ballistic helmets, and ammunition rounds.
Similar messages began proliferating across the app. That night, Austrian extremist Martin Sellner wrote—the translation here is via Google’s translation tool—that “the ‘liberal West’ is switching off the democracy simulation. All communication channels may soon collapse. Will Musk be arrested next?” The message was viewed more than 40,000 times as estimated by TGStat, a Telegram analytics tool, which provided the view counts cited in this story.
Sellner was banned from entering Germany in March for being the keynote speaker at the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party’s ill-famed November Potsdam conference. There, he presented a plan to members of Germany’s surging far-right party on conducting mass deportations once it came into power. AfD emerged victorious Sunday in a state election in eastern Germany, granting the far right a historic first since World War II.