Left unchecked, Telegram thrives in Ukraine’s disinformation battle

Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, an account on the Telegram messaging platform posing as President Volodymyr Zelensky urged his armed forces to surrender.

The message was inauthentic, and the real Zelensky soon denied the claim on his official Telegram channel, but the incident highlighted a major problem: Disinformation spreads rapidly out of control on that encrypted app.

Zelensky’s fake account reached 20,000 followers on Telegram before it was shut down, a corrective action experts say is rare.

According to Oleksandra Tsekhanovska, head of the Hybrid Warfare Analytical Group at the Kiev-based Ukraine Crisis Media Center, the effects are both short-range and far-reaching.

“For Telegram, accountability has always been an issue, which is why it was so popular even before the full-scale war with right-wing extremists and terrorists around the world,” he said from his home on the outskirts of the city. Ukrainian capital.

Telegram has 500 million users, who share data individually and in groups with relative security. But Telegram’s use as a one-way broadcast channel, which followers can join but not reply to, means that content from inauthentic accounts can easily reach large audiences.

Fake news is often spread through public groups or chats, with potentially fatal effects.

“Someone posing as a Ukrainian citizen just joins the chat and starts spreading misinformation or collecting data, such as the location of shelters,” Tsekhanovska explained, noting how fake messages have prompted Ukrainians to turn off their phones. phones at a specific time of night, citing the cybersecurity argument

Such instructions could endanger people: citizens are warned of air strikes through alerts on their phones.

lax or absent

In addition, the technical architecture of Telegram limits the ability to stop the spread of false information: the lack of a public flow of messages and the fact that comments are easily disabled in the channels, reduce the space for complaints.

Although some channels have been removed, analysts consider the repair process to be opaque and insufficient.

“It’s in stark contrast to how other companies are run today,” said Emerson Brooking, a disinformation expert at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory.

WhatsApp, a rival messaging platform, introduced some measures to counter disinformation in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic: it restricted the number of times a user could forward something and developed automated systems that detect and flag objectionable content.

Unlike Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Twitter, which run very public anti-disinformation programs, Brooking noted that “Telegram is famously lax or absent in its content moderation policy.”

Consequently, the pandemic saw many Telegram newcomers, including prominent anti-vaccine activists, scramble to share false information about vaccines, according to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

“More proactive”

Unlike Facebook, Google and Twitter, Telegram’s founder, Russian Pavel Durov, runs his company in relative secrecy from Dubai.

However, on February 27, he admitted from his Russian-language account that “Telegram channels are increasingly becoming a source of unverified information related” to the conflict in Ukraine.

Although he first outlined that he would restrict some channels in Russia and Ukraine “for the duration of the conflict” due to the inability to verify content on all of them, he changed his stance after many users complained that Telegram was an important source of information.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Kiev-based lawyer and director of the Center for Civil Liberties, called Durov’s position “very weak.”

“You have to start being more proactive and find a real solution to this situation, not stand by without interfering. It is a very irresponsible position of the owner of Telegram ”, he opined.

In the United States, Telegram’s lower public profile has helped it avoid congressional scrutiny, but it hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Some people used the platform to organize before the attack on the US Congressional headquarters in early January 2021, and last month Senator Mark Warner sent a letter to Durov urging him to curb Russian information operations on Telegram.