Dear Reader,
It’s tempting to think of all social media platforms as the same. And they do have a lot of commonalities: They are pretty much all run by emotionally stunted billionaire tech bros; they are hotbeds of disinformation that impact almost every aspect of our lives; and they are so addictive we can’t seem to quit them no matter how bad they get. It’s easy, then, to assume that the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov last week in Paris might be the start of a slippery slope against free speech on social media platforms more generally. But a closer look at both the unique features of Telegram combined with the particular kinds of speech at issue in Pavel’s arrest suggests that it’s unlikely that other platforms will be targeted in the same way – and perhaps that it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if they were.
It’s likely that you’re not super familiar with Telegram, since it is much more popular outside of the United States than it is here. First, its origins: Telegram was founded in Russia by Durov and and his brother Nikolai in 2013. The pair had previously owned Vkontakte, a Russian social media platform similar to Facebook, but shut it down in 2014 after a run-in with Russian authorities who wanted data on users who had been involved in the pro-democracy protests in Ukraine in 2013. The brothers based Telegram in Dubai, introducing a social media platform that combines messaging and social media features in novel ways.
Three main features make Telegram, which currently has almost a billion users, different from other social media platforms. The first is that like other messaging apps, Telegram allows for group chats – except that it can accommodate “groups” of up to 200,000 people (by comparison, WhatsApp limits groups to 1024 users). Telegram also offers public facing “channels” which can have an unlimited number of subscribers; the channel’s administrators can push whatever content they want on it. Unlike in other social media apps, however, subscribers cannot comment or otherwise add their own input on content published through Telegram’s channels. Finally, users can opt-in to “secret chats” which provide end-to-end encryption, similar to messaging apps like Signal – the content on these chats cannot be accessed even by Telegram itself.
