▪️Telegram is the Wild West of social networks, where almost anything goes. The encrypted app prides itself on championing the freedom and privacy of its users. Terrorists, extremists, and drug traffickers gather under its protective umbrella.

▪️Police and governments have expressed frustration over the platform’s reluctance to cooperate with authorities compared to other social networks. Recently, Telegram facilitated the spread of unrest in the UK after a stabbing in Southport. Users circulated provocative images, urging far-right supporters to take to the streets.

▪️Durov fled Putin’s Russia after a fallout with the authorities. At a tech conference in San Francisco, he said, “Privacy is ultimately more important than our fear of bad things like terrorism.” Nonetheless, some Russian government officials have used Telegram for communication.

▪️The app gained infamy as the favored social network for ISIS to promote propaganda, recruit, and control young people.

▪️Europol’s director, Rob Wainwright, stated in 2017 to The Times that Telegram “creates significant challenges” for counterterrorism operations, “offering some cooperation, but nowhere near what we get from Facebook, Twitter, and others.”

▪️Former French intelligence chief Patrick Calvar said that Telegram is the primary network used by terrorists.

▪️Telegram remains a haven for extremists. The “Patriotic Alternative” group, which Michael Gove accused of promoting neo-Nazi ideology, has about 7,000 followers, and its leader Mark Collett, a Hitler admirer, has nearly 20,000. They are banned from platform X (formerly Twitter).

▪️Telegram was used by Joe Marsh, the organizer of “Patriotic Alternative,” also known as Joe Butler, after the child murders in Southport, to rally users to join a “protest demonstration.” The event’s online flyer featured an image of a bloody handprint. The demonstration escalated into a mass attack on a mosque and the police. In one Telegram chat, users shared police movement information and discussed potential targets.

▪️Fortune magazine dubbed Telegram “an app for finding heroin, guns, and anything illegal.”

▪️The app provides three opportunities for malicious behavior. Secret chats are protected by end-to-end encryption. Users can create channels to post extreme materials with minimal censorship. Groups are formed where like-minded individuals can be bribed and recruited.

▪️The BBC reported that pedophiles use Telegram to provide access to child abuse content. Telegram claimed that user reports about child images are typically handled within an hour and that it proactively seeks to prevent platform abuse.

▪️In 2018, Telegram was briefly banned from Apple’s App Store due to users sharing child abuse images but was reinstated within hours. Apple stated that fixes had been made to prevent such content from reappearing.

▪️Britain’s most racist YouTuber, James Owens, exposed by The Times under the pseudonym “Ayatollah,” joined the public celebration on Telegram when three black England players missed penalties in the Euro 2021 final.

▪️Tahra Ahmed, imprisoned for racial hatred at the Old Bailey after an investigation by The Times, founded the Telegram channel Freedom Festival. It promoted such extreme anti-Semitic propaganda that he even claimed Hitler was “a puppet of the Zionists.”