With 550 million users, Telegram is the biggest underground app in the world. A hybrid messaging service and social network, the company seems to make controversy a core part of its business.
From its early days as a rebellion against growing censorship in its founders’ home nation of Russia, through controversies around its lack of encryption and adoption of cryptocurrency, to its role today as an essentially unmoderated chatroom that has been accused of providing a platform for organising riots in the UK, the through line has been an ardent, and often reckless, belief in free speech.
Telegram was co-founded by exiled Russian billionaire brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov in 2013, but the app isn’t Pavel’s first business – that was the Russian Facebook clone VKontakte, launched seven years earlier. He gradually lost control of that website, in tandem with the national government cracking down on independent voices on and offline, so he co-founded Telegram from exile in Berlin.
Its headquarters are now legally in the British Virgin Islands, but for practical purposes, it is run from Dubai, where Durov now holds one of his four citizenships.
Initially, the service was similar to other messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Facebook’s Messenger, but in the years since, it has diverged to become more of a social network in its own right. As well as communicating one-to-one, users can join groups of up to 200,000 people and create broadcast “channels” that others can follow and leave comments on.
As a result, the service exists in a grey area between the public and private internet: its contents don’t show up on Google and are relatively opaque to those who aren’t already a member of the communities that use it. And yet, at the same time, messages can be spread farther and faster than even on a high-velocity chat app such as WhatsApp.
In the UK, Telegram gained prominence in far-right circles as one of the last places that the EDL founder, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, was allowed to post. Having been banned from most major social networks, his Telegram channel was the easiest way for his fanbase to keep up with his missives – at least until Elon Musk rescinded his ban from Twitter, now X.
Over the past week, that community has coalesced around conspiracist channels like those run by the Unity News Network (UNN) and the far-right group Patriotic Alternative, as well as single-purpose groups with names like “Southport Wake Up”. In UNN’s channel, commenters applauded the violence seen on the streets, leading to a video message from the group’s founder imploring members to avoid posting material that could get them in trouble with the law.
“We’ve been spending 24 hours a day for the last week attempting to dig down and find out who is organising these events,” Joe Mulhall, the director of research at Hope Not Hate, told the Observer. “And what you find is that someone sets up a Telegram channel saying something like: ‘Nottingham rising, we’ll be here at 3pm on Saturday’, and no one has any idea who that is.”
The private nature of Telegram limits the impact of moderation. A chat can have 100,000 members, but if it’s a private group, then no one outside will even see infringing content to report it. Not that doing so will necessarily lead to action. In 2015, after accusations that the service was taking limited action against its use by Islamic State, Durov said: “Our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism.”
A decade on, the service has a more active moderation team than it once did, but Durov has continued to pick fights elsewhere. Over the course of 2024, he has engaged in a battle of words with rival messaging service Signal, joining in with accusations that the encrypted messenger may have links to the US state. It’s an odd fight for Telegram to join since, unlike most rivals, the service is not end-to-end encrypted by default, instead relying on users to actively enable a “secret chat” feature.
Despite the constant tussle with governments over moderation and censorship issues, though, the closest Telegram has come to disaster was in 2017, when it decided to create its own blockchain, TON. A $1.7bn sale of the resulting cryptocurrency drew legal heat from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and by the end of 2019, Telegram was forced to return the money and pay a fine of almost $21m.
