Digital Threat Report: Telegram’s Toxic Recommendations Perpetuate Extremism
Executive Summary
Telegram is a social media and messaging application that is popular worldwide but was less commonly used in the U.S. until 2019. Following the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, the 2020 rise of QAnon and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, U.S.-based platforms such as Facebook and Twitter began to ban, or “deplatform,” users who violated their terms of service by posting hate speech or disinformation. Many of these users began using Telegram as a replacement. Telegram is free, broadly available for all devices and has most of the features found on these other platforms, including channels to spread propaganda and chats for small-group messaging. Most importantly for its extremist users, Telegram also has relatively lax content moderation practices. A broad variety of extremist groups and individuals, including neo-Nazis, antisemites, conspiracy theorists, Proud Boys, QAnon influencers and others, are now operating openly on Telegram, spreading propaganda, recruiting new adherents and forming communities.
To understand the way these extremists interact on Telegram, we collected a trove of data from the “similar channels” feature that Telegram launched in late 2023. Telegram calculates the proportion of users of one channel who are also on other channels, recommending these as “similar channels.” By collecting these recommendations for a large number of extremist channels, we were able to uncover the joining patterns that undergird Telegram, including crossover between channels and neighborhoods of channels.
The results show that Telegram users are regularly suggested extremist channels, even when browsing channels that are ostensibly about nonpolitical subjects such as celebrities or technology. Even users who elect to consume extremist content from one ideology or belief system, such as antigovernment conspiracies or election disinformation, can find themselves being “suggested” channels from other extremist ideologies such as antisemitism or white nationalism.
Founders and origins
Brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov launched Telegram in 2013. The pair had previously founded another social media application, VKontakte (VK), often called “the Russian Facebook.” After he was ousted from his role as CEO of VK in 2014, Pavel Durov left Russia and began to focus entirely on the development of Telegram. The platform, now headquartered in Dubai, is funded solely by donations from its founders and through bond sales to several venture capital firms.
Nikolai Durov developed Telegram’s encryption protocol, MTProto (Mobile Transport Protocol), in 2013. MTProto combines three well-known encryption mechanisms, but cryptography experts have criticized the protocol because it has not been vetted or peer-reviewed by the broader cryptography community. Telegram offers this encryption for voice and video calls, and encryption is optional for private messaging, called “secret chats.”
Key features and popularity
In 2015, Telegram expanded its functionality by adding broadcast channels for one-way communication, as well as public and private discussion groups that can host up to 200,000 users. These features have made Telegram indispensable for extremist groups, allowing them to spread propaganda and recruit new members while maintaining secure communication on the same platform.
The platform’s file storage feature also allows these groups to store and disseminate a wide range of propaganda materials, from e-books and podcasts to instructional videos. Built-in audio and video broadcasting allows users to compete directly with streaming services such as YouTube and Twitch. Customizable sticker sets and a programmable “bot” infrastructure add to its appeal, enabling groups to manage administrative tasks and facilitate financial transactions without having to leave the app.
Telegram’s combination of public channels, encrypted messaging and file storage makes it a potent tool for extremist groups. Users who have been deplatformed from other social media sites have found a haven on Telegram, exploiting its unique combination of technologies to further their agendas.
In October, Pavel Durov claimed on his Telegram channel that the platform has 100 million users. In an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier in the year, Pavel Durov estimated that his company had only about 30 engineers, and one project manager: himself.
Content moderation and reporting issues
With such a large user base and small staff, Pavel Durov has not built an organization that is capable of handling content moderation issues at scale. Observers criticize Telegram’s approach to content moderation for its lack of transparency and responsiveness. The platform relies on users to flag inappropriate content, but the reporting process lacks specific classifications for hate or terror content. Users also receive minimal or no follow-up on their reports, undermining confidence in the system and allowing extremist content to proliferate.
While Telegram has taken steps to remove ISIS-related content, even creating a channel called “ISIS Watch” that publishes daily statistics on how many terrorist bots and channels were deleted the previous day, its efforts to curb white supremacist content have been more muted. Telegram sometimes restricts channels on certain platforms, such as mobile devices, but they remain accessible via web browsers, allowing hate speech and terrorist content to thrive.
The process for getting a channel banned on mobile devices is not well understood. Early versions of the Telegram data model, visible to programmers through an application programming interface (API), indicated the specific reason when a channel was banned. In 2019, a channel might have a “restriction reason” that read, “appleviolence-ios: Unfortunately, this group couldn’t be displayed on your device because it violates Apple App Store Review Guidelines, section 1.1.1.” Similar messages existed for Google and Microsoft. More recently, the error message reads simply, “Unfortunately, this channel couldn’t be displayed on your device.”
In August, French authorities arrested Pavel Durov on charges related to Telegram’s use by criminals to conduct activities including money laundering and drug trafficking. French authorities also allege that Telegram has been used for distributing extremist content and child sexual abuse material.
Authorities released Durov after four days of questioning. He paid a bail of 5 million euros and is required to report to a police station twice a week.
Telegram’s about-face on recommendations: The ‘similar channels’ feature
How do users on Telegram find each other, and how do they find extremist content?
Most platforms use recommendation algorithms for this task. People who watch a cat video are suggested more cat videos to watch. People who join a neighborhood buy-and-sell group may be suggested groups in the next nearby town. Because these algorithms are automated and are based on user behavior, however, they sometimes suggest content that is violent, politically extreme and worse. Researchers have consistently reported the risks of these recommendation algorithms on other platforms, including YouTube and TikTok.
In 2021, Pavel Durov referred to such recommendation algorithms as “the sticky mud of irrelevant content” and in 2023 stated unequivocally his position on them, writing on his Telegram channel: “Unlike other apps that algorithmically promote shocking content to unsuspecting people, on Telegram, users receive only the content to which they specifically subscribed. As such, it’s unlikely that Telegram channels can be used to significantly amplify propaganda.”
Without such recommendation algorithms, Telegram users were left to proactively search for extremist content or devise elaborate ways of sharing their own recommendations with each other, including creating a section of the competing website Reddit just for sharing Telegram channel links. User-created directories, such as the one shown in Figure 1, were also common ways of sharing information about how to find similar channels.
In November 2023, this all changed. Telegram introduced a “similar channels” tab, which now appears on most Telegram channels. The tab recommends up to 100 other channels that users might enjoy. According to Telegram, these “if you liked A, you might also like B” recommendations are automatically calculated based on “similarities in their subscriber bases.” Importantly, if a user is already a subscriber to a given channel, that channel will not appear on the list of similar channels. In this way, the similar-channels list serves as a proactive recommendation service and is personalized to each user.
The impact of toxic recommendations
The introduction of the similar-channels feature represents a significant about-face for Telegram — one that, as this report shows, contradicts Pavel Durov’s claims about Telegram’s capacity to amplify propaganda and “promote shocking content to unsuspecting people.”
To understand the way extremist channels are tightly interconnected on Telegram through this common user base, and the way extremist channels are recommended to users, we created a list of 300 English-language, U.S.-centric Telegram channels espousing a variety of extremist ideologies, including White Nationalist, Neo-Nazi, Neo-Confederate, Antigovernment, Conspiracy Propagandist and others. We then created a new account with no history on the platform and no channel affiliations. We collected the similar channels that Telegram recommended for each of these 300 channels, then collected the similar channels for all those, and repeated that process for a total of three generations. In all, we collected a set of 28,049 channels, with 221,250 recommendations between them.
Figure 2 shows the first two generations of this network. (Space limitations preclude us showing larger versions of the network.) Each circle, or node, in the diagram represents a channel. The size of each node corresponds to how many subscribers the channel has.
See the full interactive graph.
The largest 1st generation (blue) channels are, in order: Donald Trump Jr. (shortname: trumpjr), Lin Wood (linwoodspeakstruth), Midnight Rider (realkarlibonne), Ron Watkins (codemonkeyz) and Charlie Kirk (charliekirk). These channels are all located in the top third of the diagram. The largest of these, Donald Trump Jr., has around 485,000 members.
The largest 2nd generation (magenta) channels are: Rybar (rybar) with 1.2 million subscribers, Donald J. Trump (real_donaldjtrump) with 636,000 subscribers, Amar Tsarfati (beholdisraelchannel) with 490,000 subscribers, Intel Slava Z (intelslava) with 400,000 subscribers, and Disclose.TV (disclosetv) with 382,000 subscribers.
The U.S. government recently offered a $10 million reward for information about election interference activities associated with the largest of these, Rybar. The Rybar channel was included in our diagram because Telegram recommended it to users of a channel called “/CIG/ Telegram” (97,000 subscribers), which states that its goal is to blend “ultraright genopolitics with geopolitics” and racist, ethnonationalist “völkisch aesthetics.” The channel is direct about its recruitment mission, encouraging visitors to use its Telegram bot to find others in their local area who want to build an ethnostate.
Next, we developed a visualization of this network of channels, adding colors to indicate the “neighborhoods” where the channels are the most closely connected to each other based on the underlying similar user base. We then assigned labels to describe the ideology or beliefs most common to that group of channels.
We next calculated various network centrality metrics that would allow us to understand the network better, such as by locating the most influential or important channels. So-called “bridge nodes” are influential because they connect disparate parts of the network. In this network, we used a measurement called “betweenness” to find such channels.
The channel with the highest betweenness score was Disclose.TV. This channel, with 382,000 subscribers, promotes conspiracy theories including Holocaust denial and medical misinformation. Telegram recommends that visitors to Disclose.TV follow similar channels, including white nationalist content like Red Ice TV and Femoids Unleashed, a meme-sharing channel for men who call themselves involuntary celibates, or misogynist incels.
Another influential bridge in the network is a neo-Nazi accelerationist channel called Zoomerwaffen. This channel was recommended by Telegram 564 times in our data set — more than any other channel in the network of 28,000 nodes. Not only does Telegram recommend Zoomerwaffen for users who visit geopolitical channels such as Disclose.TV and /CIG/Telegram, both mentioned earlier, but it also suggests overtly violent content for Zoomerwaffen users, including a fan channel for American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell and a channel called “I’m schizophrenic and I have a gun.”
Other channels that Telegram most frequently recommends to users in this network include multiple QAnon influencers; channels filled with racist and sexist AI-generated art; and a channel with the tagline “Criminal Thoughts directly from the Kali Yuga,” referring to a synthesis of Hindu cosmology and Nazism.
The Tucker Carlson-to-Russian propaganda pipeline
Telegram’s toxic recommendation system also affects official accounts on the platform. For example, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene maintains two official (“blue checkmark”) Telegram accounts. Her visitors receive Telegram recommendations from a variety of MAGA and hard-right personalities, including Trump adviser and convicted felon Steve Bannon and former attorney and MAGA conspiracist Lin Wood. However, Telegram also recommends to users of Greene’s two channels several even more extreme channels, including multiple QAnon influencers and medical misinformation peddlers, and a blog whose current lead story is about the “white genocide,” a white nationalist myth and rallying cry, in Rhodesia. Rhodesia was an unrecognized state in modern-day Zimbabwe, where from 1965 to 1979 white people violently resisted decolonization and fought to maintain their minority rule.
Similarly, Telegram recommends multiple QAnon conspiracy theory channels, all with more than 150,000 subscribers, and several large, active Russian news aggregators devoted to publishing Kremlin talking points to users of blue-checkmark channels including the anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant “satire” site The Babylon Bee; disinformation propagandist Jack Posobiec; Donald Trump Jr.; and Tucker Carlson Network (TCN).
Of the 93 channels recommended to users who visit the official TCN Telegram channel, 67 (72%) are Russian-language channels. We found no other official, U.S.-based channel with a percentage of Russian channel recommendation as high as TCN. Carlson has interviewed both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Telegram founder Pavel Durov for his network within the past year.
Even users who are browsing nonpolitical channels can be recommended extremist channels on Telegram. Users of the official blue-check account for the Singapore Roman Catholic Archdiocese receive a recommendation to join a channel associated with a Groyper (a follower of Nick Fuentes and his white nationalist, antisemitic America First movement).
Visitors to Watcher Guru, an official blue-checkmark cryptocurrency news channel, are recommended channels from male supremacist influencer Andrew Tate, who offers such commentary as “Money is made when there is blood on the streets” to his 450,000 channel subscribers.
Imposter accounts
Sometimes this crossover happens because Telegram recommends channels based on the number of common users between two channels. However, Telegram is also replete with imposter accounts — those that have names or images that are similar to real accounts but have slightly different spellings and offer much different content — which adds to the confusion for users who are trying to find relevant content. Searching for “Oprah Winfrey,” for example, returns dozens of channels with variations of Winfrey’s name, including one that purports to offer episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show, last broadcast in 2011, packaged into compressed files for download. A Data Lab analysis of the files determined that they contain information-stealing malware.
In 2022, the company began taking cryptocurrency payments from people who want to reserve these duplicate usernames for themselves.
Our work in mapping the similar-channels network uncovered a set of a dozen QAnon-themed and ostensibly MAGA-affiliated channels that had paid more than $17,000 for imposter usernames like RamaswamyVivek and Melania_Trump3 and were using them to distribute malware, hawk fake gold coins and conduct other scams. Because they all shared tens of thousands of users in common, each channel in this group was promoted to the other channels in the cluster. Visually, this group of inauthentic channels formed a tightly connected mini-cluster inside our network, and therefore was easy to trace.
Only one of the channels in this mini-cluster had been marked as “fake” by Telegram. It is unclear what the procedure is for getting a channel marked as fake, why the platform didn’t simply remove the channel and why the same label was not applied to other channels in this set.
Some channels do not ever have similar channels assigned to them by Telegram. The reason for this decision is not documented anywhere, but inactive channels and those with very small subscriber numbers seem to be most likely to be excluded from the similar-channels feature.
Telegram also occasionally removes channels from the similar-channels feature. Late in this study, the Zoomerwaffen channel — which we had discovered was one of the most often recommended channels in our data set — suddenly had its “similar channels” tab removed, and channels that had previously recommended it no longer did.
Holding Telegram responsible
In his first public comments since the August arrest, Durov stated that Telegram abides by EU laws and that its content moderation practices are within industry standards. He emphasized that he has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe. He also said Telegram would increase oversight and moderation.
When asked whether that new approach will extend to its promotion of extremist channels and inauthentic content, Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.
Picture at top: Photo illustration by the SPLC
