The Daily - How Telegram Became the Underworld’s Favorite App

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

A Times investigation has found that Telegram, one of the world’s biggest messaging apps, with nearly a billion users, is also a giant black market and gathering place for the likes of terrorists and white supremacists.Adam Satariano, a technology reporter for The Times, discusses the story of Telegram and the arrest of its founder, Pavel Durov.Guest: Adam Satariano, a technology correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: How Telegram became a playground for criminals, extremists and terrorists.The criminal charges against Pavel Durov raised concerns in Silicon Valley about encryption and Telegram’s approach to privacy and security.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. A Times investigation has found that one of the world's biggest messaging apps, with nearly a billion users, is also a giant black market and gathering place for terrorists and white supremacists. Today, my colleague Adam Satariano on the extraordinary story of Telegram and how it's led to one of the first arrests of a social media CEO in history. It's Monday, September 23rd. Adam, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me.

So Adam, you and our colleagues just published a big investigation into what's going on inside this giant messaging app called Telegram. And it really came at the perfect time because the founder of the platform was arrested in France just a few weeks ago. So tell us what happened. So this was a fascinating case.

This guy, Pavel Durov, a Russian tech billionaire, his private plane lands at an airport outside Paris, and he is immediately picked up by the French authorities and detained. And the French authorities at first are providing very little detail about what happened. It happens over a weekend, there's not much public statements being put out, there's a few French media reports. And then a few days later, the French prosecutors put out a press release, one page long, and it just lists all these different things that he's been charged with, complicity in crimes, including the spread of child pornography, drug trafficking, organized

gang fraud, criminal conspiracy. And this was a shock and an important moment because Telegram is a massive platform that's used by almost a billion people around the world. And it raised this really fascinating question of to what extent does the head of a tech company be held responsible for what users of that service are now doing. Okay, so this is a huge platform. A big chunk of the world uses it. And its founder, Durov, is in trouble because of what's happening on it. So let's start with him, Durov. Tell me about him. He's a fascinating character. He was born in the Soviet Union. He moved to Italy when he was a child. His father was an academic and was working there. And then after the fall of the Soviet Union, they moved back to St. Petersburg.

And he and his brother, who is a real engineering whiz, become fascinated with an IBM computer that they had brought back with them from Italy. And when Pavel is in university, he's shown Facebook for the first time, and he becomes fascinated by it. And he's like, I want to create my own. And so they start their own version of Facebook geared towards Russia, a company known as VK. VKontakte, as it's known in Russian. Yes. And it explodes in popularity.

And, Durov himself begins to develop a bit of a profile. On the one hand, he becomes known as Russia's Mark Zuckerberg. He starts a social media company. It's at a time when having a startup like that is cool. He's being written about in places like TechCrunch and other Western press. But on the other hand, he's sort of a loose cannon. He has this incident where he throws cash out the window of their offices in St. Petersburg, and it leads to a street fight down below.

In another instance, he hit a police officer with a car when he's trying to evade a traffic stop because he had driven onto the sidewalk to avoid traffic. And so he has this kind of trollish element to him, but he's one who has a lot of money and therefore a lot of power and influence at the time. So kind of like a tech bro with a troll-y kind of contrarian attitude. But knowing Putin and Russia, that's probably a pretty dangerous position to take at that time in that country. Right. As the popularity of the service takes off, it's also drawing the attention of the Russian authorities who start coming to

Dorov and the company for information about users. And it becomes a source of tension and it's also a point where you start to see Dorov's anti-authority streak come forward. When the authorities were asking for information about some opposition politicians, he responded online by posting a picture of a hoodie wearing dog and he said, this is my official response to the intelligence services. So thumbing his nose at the Russian authorities, which as we all know can be a little dangerous. Exactly. And it comes to a head over some Ukrainian activists that the Russian authorities want Durov to provide information

about. And it becomes this moment where he is forced to decide whether or not he's going to cooperate with Russian authorities or if he is going to have to hand it over. So he's essentially forced to sell the company. He chooses that. So Durov is essentially forced to abandon his own darling here, his company that he built from scratch, and he chooses to do that rather than to see it become something that he doesn't agree with.

Exactly. That must have been pretty painful. Yeah, it was. Obviously, my first company was my baby. I created my stuff. There was a lot of creativity, time and effort invested in that platform. Duroff doesn't really give many interviews, but a few months ago, he had one with Tucker Carlson and they touched on this moment. But at the same time, I understood that I would rather be free.

I would want to take orders from anyone. And I left behind probably a comfortable life. And he makes it really clear that this was a dilemma, but the choice was clear. For him, he knew what he had to do. For me, everything in my life was about becoming free. And to the extent it is possible, my mission in life was to allow other people to also become free, in a sense.

And using the platforms that we created or I created, my hope was that they could express their freedoms. For Durov, this moment ends up being a really important inflection point in his life. Because in the middle of all this, getting all this pressure from Russian authorities in losing VK, he starts to build a communications platform that he hopes will sit outside any government and that they won't be able to crack down on. And that tool is Telegram. So tell me about the birth of Telegram. How does it get started? Duroff starts Telegram in 2013, and it's the next year in January 2014 that they announce

that he's lost VK. And he decides to leave Russia and look for a new place to push ahead with this new project. And so he and a handful of engineers, they bounce around to different places. They become something like digital nomads. They're in Berlin, they're in London, they're in San Francisco. They even push out a software update from a boat in Southeast Asia. They eventually land in Dubai, where Durof says that the government's given assurances that they won't meddle in what they're doing.

And he feels it's a place can be a long-term home for Telegram. What does Telegram look like in those early days? So when Telegram first comes out, it's basically a simple messaging app, like iMessage or WhatsApp. You can text your friends, you can start small group chats. But over the next few years, Telegram becomes much, much more. In 2015, they added something called Channels, and these are basically one-way broadcasting

features. Any user can start a channel, you send a message, and anyone who subscribes will receive it. In governments, public figures, and others begin to flock there. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is there. You have government agencies that post flock there. Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky is there. You have government agencies that post updates there. But it's also all sorts of random quirky stuff too. You can get reality TV news from Brazil there. You can get math lessons in India there. Prepare for civil service exams. It really runs the gamut.

So Telegram is already beginning to sort of transition here from a pure messaging app to some kind of social media platform. Exactly. And they continue down this path. In 2015, they also introduced something called Super Groups. And it's like a typical group chat with a lot more people. And so these Super Groups start out

with 1,000 people user cap. But over the course of the next few years Telegram increases the cap exponentially. It's five thousand, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand, all the way up to two hundred thousand in 2019. And how unusual is this, Adam? I mean, do the other tech companies have features like this? Not in the same way, no. In fact, as they were expanding the number of people who could participate in these kind

of groups, others like WhatsApp were going the other direction because of concerns that were being raised about the spread of misinformation or disinformation. And so you have Telegram really moving in a different direction from these other platforms, and it helps distinguish it and it helps it grow. Right, and how much is it growing? How popular does Telegram actually get? So Telegram starts off with 100,000 users in 2013, and just three years later, it's grown to 100 million users.

And today, Telegram has nearly a billion active users. And so just to give you some sense of context, it's the fourth most popular messaging app in the world behind WhatsApp, WeChat, the giant Chinese messaging service, and Facebook Messenger. That's just a wild number of people. It really is. And what's wilder to me is that over the years as Telegram is exploding in popularity,

the company itself stays essentially the same size. So Telegram has around 60 core employees and it basically operates still like it's a small startup. There's no HR department, there's like a stitched together content moderation team, there's Dura off at the top, and some other core employees, and that's it. I mean this is just so remarkable because when you think of big tech platforms, say like Meta for example, you think of them employing tens of thousands of workers, not

fewer than a hundred like you have here with Telegram. Right, absolutely. And it's really a reflection of what Telegram is. They don't have a large team of content moderators because they don't need one. They don't believe in it. They're not interested in limiting what their users say or do. Telegram bills itself as anti-establishment. It's anti-authoritarian.

It's free speech. It's what Durof believes in. And he's become this sort of free speech folk hero in the tech community. And that ethos is what attracts hundreds of millions of users to Telegram. But it's also what lays the groundwork for Duroff's problems. Because some of those users who are flocking to Telegram are doing so for some pretty nefarious reasons. We'll be right back. So, Adam, you said the telegrams ethos created this kind of free for all, which ultimately

led to Duroff's problems. And that is, of course, what you and our colleagues have been investigating. So what is actually happening on this platform? Yeah, so by the time Pavel Durov was arrested getting off his jet in Paris, myself and some other colleagues, we were months into an investigation into Telegram. So using software, we were able to analyze 3.2 million messages on Telegram across 16,000 channels. And what we soon began to find as we look deeper is the volume of criminal and extremist behavior that is happening on there was really quite shocking.

And Adam, when you started to look into these channels, what exactly did you find? One of the main things that we found was the volume of sort of white supremacy and white supremacist groups that are operating in Europe and the United States especially. And they use Telegram for communication, for recruitment, for sharing their ideology. And in some respects you see that these groups are also a place for staging violence. There's a group called Terrorgram that's been designated a terror organization in the UK where they are plotting violence and sharing information about weapons in other ways to stage potential attacks. And it's really provided a haven for them to grow.

So Adam, give me an example of a group that really has used all of these features of Telegram, as you're saying. One of the clearest examples that we found is Hamas. This is the defeated army. And so when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, it announced the assault on Telegram. Within a few hours of moving in, they began posting all sorts of videos of the carnage. And you've got over a three-day stretch where they've posted something like nearly 700 times, and they get over 54 million views according to the analysis that we did. Some of the videos of the hostages were shared over Telegram before some of these people

were killed. Telegram was this key, key piece of the Hamas propaganda strategy. And so it provides this massive megaphone for Hamas to share its messaging. What else did you find in your investigation? One of the most surprising things we were able to find is the extent to which Telegram acts as a black market. It is a clearinghouse for all sorts of illegal goods. You can buy handguns, you can buy machine guns, you can buy cocaine, you can buy MDMA, you can buy fraudulent ATM cards. The list goes on and on and on. So in other words, it really simplifies the process of buying or selling something illegal

online. You don't have to be a specialist. You can just be anyone with the Telegram app. Exactly. And it's happening brazenly. I mean, they post videos of people opening their deliveries, which they will call touchdowns. It has all sorts of slang that's used within a lot of these groups for buying drugs or guns. They act like salesmen like oh I can make a good deal for you. I can deliver to these 30 countries. They talk about how to make payments using cryptocurrencies. They'll have videos of packages of pharmaceuticals that they have for sale. So it's this kind of open air drug and gun market within an iPhone app. And so you have to sort of step back and think like, oh, well, bad stuff is on the internet,

who cares? But usually for this kind of stuff, you have to use the dark web, which requires a special kind of browser and it has all sorts of hoops that you might have to jump through. With Telegram, it's a simple to use app right there on your phone in your pocket. And people have called it the dark web in your pocket. So Adam, this is pretty remarkable. I mean, just how much illegal activity is happening on Telegram kind of in plain sight.

What can governments and law enforcement do to combat this kind of activity? How are they dealing with this? Governments haven't been able to do much in large part because Duroff and Telegram have refused to cooperate. We spoke to law enforcement and government agencies around the world who expressed extreme frustration in trying to get any sort of cooperation from Telegram. The NYPD told us that they don't even bother to send requests

anymore because they don't get any help from Telegram. They've stopped even trying. Yeah and German prosecutors told us the same thing. I spoke to somebody who just conducted a bunch of research in Argentina and there they have a prosecutor unit dedicated to child sexual abuse material. They can't get any help from Telegram. And so it's this black box where Telegram does not cooperate with law enforcement. And I think this is like a really important point that is what has gotten Telegram into perhaps the most trouble is that companies like Google, Meta, TikTok, they have teams of people who

are responsible for responding to requests from law enforcement and thousands of moderators who will take down all sorts of material. Telegram doesn't have that. And so therefore you end up in a situation where there is a lot of illegal activity happening on the platform and nothing is being done about it. And if you're a police department, if you're a prosecutor, that is immensely frustrating and infuriating. So this all brings us, Adam, to Pavel Durov's arrest in France and really helps me understand

what the French government might have been trying to tell him Bring me back to that case and tell me where it stands now So Pavel Durov is in France now awaiting trial at least one of the charges carries a up to 10-year prison sentence and you know the first word of the press release that the French prosecutors put out was complicity. They're essentially saying that Pavel Doroff is complicit in all these crimes that include child pornography, drug trafficking, gang fraud, criminal conspiracy. The list goes on. And so they're saying that because he and his company were so uncooperative in trying to deal with these different crimes, they say that there was an almost total lack of

response from Telegram to legal requests. And they finally had enough. And so when his plane landed in France, they grabbed him. And this is pretty unusual, right? I mean, when it comes to social media, we haven't really seen a big tech CEO held criminally responsible for something like this. Absolutely. I mean, his arrest is a big move by the French authorities. There's little precedent for something like this.

They're essentially holding him as the CEO of the company responsible for the behavior of others, basically saying he's an accomplice, he's complicit. And this is not usually how governments have handled these sorts of crimes on social media. And what has Durav said in response? What's his defense? So his main defense seems to be, I'm not responsible for what users do on my platform. He didn't sell the drugs, he didn't sell the guns. He's also said that Telegram is a victim of its success.

It grew too fast and he's expressed some contrition saying they're going to put certain new policies in place to respond more quickly to certain law enforcement requests and to moderate more content. But beyond that, this arrest really cuts to the core of what Telegram stands for. It's like what they've been trying to achieve. For Duroff, the whole point of Telegram is to create a platform that's free from government interference. It's not going to submit to government requests.

So this stands with its users, not with governments. And in places like Russia and Iran, Telegrams have been seen as a force for good. And that makes sense if you're a guy who grew up in Russia, where the government calls anyone it disagrees with a criminal or a terrorist. But in a lot of the rest of the world, including France, people live by laws, not by the whims of an authoritarian leader like Putin. And if they break those laws, the government comes after them, as it should. Right. I mean, Duroff would have us believe that this situation is incredibly black and white.

That in order to have a free space where anyone can openly express themselves, you have to have minimal moderation. It's like censorship or no. And he's arguing that the trade-off is worth it, that it's better to have Hamas broadcasting and understanding their point of view than to have a Russian police state. But the thing is, it's not totally clear that the situation is this black and white. Most of the tech sector doesn't work this way. Other social media sites like Facebook or YouTube, which are by no means perfect, they

have fairly robust policies and teams in place trying to keep the worst activity off their platforms. And they do a fairly good job of cultivating a marketplace for ideas. But like you said, that isn't how Durov sees the world. He has a very black and white view. And there's a really good chance that he's going to be held accountable for the consequences of holding on to those ideals so tightly. Adam, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. Over the weekend, a devastating Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in central Beirut on Friday killed at least 37, including two commanders. The attack levelled two apartment buildings and plunged Lebanon into further chaos. Days after Pager's and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members exploded en masse. The attacks appeared to mark a stark shift in the calculations that have long governed the decades-old conflict between Israel and Lebanon's most powerful militant group.

Until last week, Israel had refrained from launching the kind of attacks that its leaders had feared could provoke retaliatory strikes by Hezbollah. But over the past few days, Israel has crossed what had unofficially been considered red lines. The Times reports that Israel's moves seem to indicate that the country's leaders have decided they can no longer live with the threat of Hezbollah

on their northern border. And the Georgia State Election Board voted on Friday to force counties to hand count all ballots cast on Election Day, a move that critics say could significantly delay the reporting of results in the battleground state and inject chaos into the post-election period. The new rule, which passed on a 3-2 vote, runs counter to extensive legal advice from election officials and law enforcement officials in the state. The new rule is the latest in a stream of right-wing election policies

passed by the state election board over the past few months. Today's episode was produced by Luke van der Plug and Will Reed with help from Jessica Chung and Carlos Prieto. It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg, contains original music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Nimeshto and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsvark of Wonderly. That's it for the daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.