Vilified at times, Telegram becomes indispensable during the Ukraine invasion
In recent weeks, Ukrainian officials increasingly turned to messaging apps as a trustworthy means of disseminating information.
Telegram has surpassed its competing platforms to become Ukraine's most popular social media app, bolstering the country's propaganda war. It is used by protesters of all stripes and is now its way to generate revenue.
During the Ukraine conflict, Telegram, a messaging app, has emerged as a focal point. After Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent a message to his Telegram followers from the capital, Kyiv, in which he urged his fellow Ukrainians to resist the Russian invasion. It is also attracting a large number of Russians, who are utilizing the app to acquire information and conversation on Ukraine that is not state-censored. However, how do you use the program, and is it safe to do so?
You can use it to chat with your friends, but you can also set up individual groups for each of them. With around a couple of hundred thousand users, it's a mix of private one-on-one talks and large group chats. There is a separate account for following cryptocurrencies, or you may follow individuals like Sergey Zelenskyy.
Many Ukrainians have been checking the official Covid-19 Telegram channel every day for the past two years to stay up to date on the latest outbreak news. Every day, @COVID19 Ukraine reported on the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the most recent government health advice. Millions of people watched the channel during the global health crisis.
In any case, as Russian troops reached the Ukrainian border, the channel intervened. Members were asked if they were interested in learning about contemporary "socio-political" developments. The public was overwhelmingly in favor of the adjustment. It has been a vital source of verified information for Ukrainians after the Telegram channel's rebranding to @UkraineNOW began providing breaking war news 24 hours a day.
In advance of Russia's invasion, UkraineNOW had already grown to be one of the country's largest Telegram channels, with some half a million subscribers. Now, it's the primary source of war-related news for a million individuals. Every day, its posts attract an average of almost eight million views because of other channels reposting them.
Unidentified hackers attacked the Volyn province administration's website on Thursday, March the 3rd. and posted a bogus statement claiming that regional leaders had decided to surrender.
Ukraine's national security service, the SBU, was prepared for such a situation. Telegram, Russia's most popular social media network also, has been predicting Russia's use of this approach for days. As the group's members rapidly discovered, a fake surrender proclamation had been produced, leaving Volyn in Ukrainian hands.
While it is true that the SBU's Telegram channel is intended to counter Russian propaganda, it accomplishes much more. Telegram generates a significant amount of its content due to its largely unmoderated nature. According to some experts, its feed is replete with footage of Russians who appear dejected, regretful, and even bloodied, and who are all being held as alleged POWs.
Along with politicians, the SBU is one of several official channels of the Ukrainian government that have embraced Telegram as a means of disseminating information in recent weeks. Due to the app's broad use throughout the region and its capacity to disseminate messages to a large audience, it has become a critical tool in the ongoing fight to defeat Russia in the public information war.
Telegram was downloaded by one billion people last year, making it the most popular app in Eastern Europe and Russia. Users in countries with severe restrictions on online expression have responded positively to Telegram's marketing claim of being a haven of freedom of expression. The chat software, on the other hand, has attracted extremist groups such as the Islamic State and the January 6 militants.
Telegram does not attempt to censor or prevent incendiary or fraudulent content—on purpose. Security experts, on the other hand, are concerned about Telegram's chat functionality. While messages between individuals are encrypted end-to-end, group conversations are maintained on the organization's servers, making them accessible to other employees, according to Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She is skeptical of the Telegram platform being quite deceptive in that the majority of Russians she has spoken to are deceived.
Telegram, which has fewer than 30 employees, can be impervious to outside cybersecurity experts who attempt to assist them, according to Martin Albrecht, an information security professor at the University of London who wrote a paper on Telegram's cryptography and alerted the company to several exploitable vulnerabilities. He observed that Telegram is not a transparent company and they didn't even get the identity of the person they were speaking with until the research was released.
Telegram has become a breeding ground for misinformation as a result of its lack of reactivity. While American social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become more diligent in identifying and removing government propaganda campaigns, Telegram has been significantly less proactive, frequently leaving up profiles that those other companies have removed.
Telegram, on the other hand, has a reputation for evading censorship in former Soviet republics. Russia abandoned its efforts to stop it in 2018 following a protracted court struggle. As the majority of Belarus's web services were shut down in 2020 to quell pro-democracy protests, Telegram became one of the few remaining means for civilians to communicate effectively.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian censorship has increased, with residents being barred from accessing non-state news sources and citizens being denied access to Facebook and Twitter. Natalia Krapiva, a legal strategist at the digital rights organization Access Now, believes that Telegram is the greatest way for regular Russians to stay informed about the invasion's progress.
She remarked that Telegram is the only independent social media platform that will allow for alternate viewpoints and anti-war voices, adding that she hopes Russia does not attempt to shut it down again. Krapiva predicted calamity if Telegram went down at this point.