Bart Custers about extremists on Telegram
Extremist users of Telegram are moving en masse to other chat apps, such as the anonymous SimpleX. In this way, they hope to avoid detection, now that Telegram founder Pavel Durov is going to share personal data of criminal users with authorities.
Bart Custers, Professor of Law and Data Science and Head of Department at eLaw, says in an article in Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant on 11 November 2024 that he’s seen this ripple effect before. ‘Criminals are afraid of being discovered by the police, and are constantly seeking hidden spaces on the edges of the internet.’ Their most favoured chat apps recognise the importance of anonymity and encryption of messages.
Telegram has been popular among criminals for a long time: users can communicate in large groups anonymously in the app. So it’s ideal for posting requests for explosives, sharing child pornography and preparing an attack. At least, that was the case until the boss of Telegram was arrested in August in France, accused of facilitating crime. As Durov now faces 10 years in jail and a €500,000 fine, Telegram is suddenly prepared to share data of criminal users with the authorities.
‘You can’t stop people moving from one platform to another, just as you can’t stop criminals from meeting in cafés to do business,’ Custers says in De Volkskrant. ‘There are countless SimpleX-like platforms and the police can’t monitor them all.’
But the police and judicial authorities do have other options. When police in the Netherlands infiltrated the criminal Hansa marketplace on the dark web in 2017, they gathered as much information about users as possible before shutting it down. This included tracking which new platforms users fled to. The same can be done when moving from Telegram to SimpleX: to join a SimpleX group, users need a link. That is usually sent in the Telegram group, which may already be monitored by the authorities.