Everybody loves Telegram, including Islamic State’s jihadis

I discovered Telegram on a recent trip to Saudi Arabia. Activists told me they’d been migrating to the messaging site from Twitter and WhatsApp, both of which have been immensely popular for years.

When I downloaded Telegram messenger, I came across several Iranian contacts. “Did you know that more than 23m Iranians use Telegram?” one of them messaged me. “Telegram has the best stickers,” gushed another.

Good thing, I thought, that Saudis and Iranians had found a new safe haven to express themselves and escape the watchful eyes of the authorities. Good thing too that two nations so bitterly divided over politics were united in their social media habits.

Two weeks later, though, the benefits of Berlin-based Telegram took on a darker side: in the wake of the Paris attacks, the messaging service was revealed as the favourite of the jihadis of Isis too.

It was in late September that Isis took to Telegram. The messenging app had just announced a “channels” service, which was billed as more secure than Twitter or Facebook. Isis channels have since proliferated. One channel, called Nashir, was offered in eight different languages, including Arabic, French, German and Turkish.

For Isis, which considers audience reach a priority, Telegram’s primary appeal was its simplicity, not only its security. “Isis will use any platform to disseminate information and Telegram took off very quickly because it’s user-friendly, it takes no time to release messages, especially that it enables users to attach any kind and size of file quickly . . . and resolves the need for outside links” says Rita Katz, director of SITE Intelligence group, which tracks jihadi sites.

The brainchild of Pavel Durov, often referred to as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg, the two-year-old Telegram prides itself for being “super fast, simple and free” as well as heavily encrypted. It offers special secret chats that use end to end encryption, leave no trace on the services, and have self-destructing features too. The service is so confident of its security that it runs a competition promising a $300,000 prize to anyone who can prove that messages can be deciphered.

Mr Durov, who considers Edward Snowden his personal hero, started Telegram after refusing to shut down Russian opposition pages during anti-government protests, which led to his falling out with the Kremlin.

He was forced to sell his stake in VKontakte, a social networking site he had founded, and then he left Russia. “Our right for private communication and privacy is more important than the marginal threats that some politicians would like to make us afraid of,” he said in July.

Statistically, he claimed, the probability of slipping on a wet floor in your bathroom and dying was a thousand times higher than that of perishing as a result of terrorism.

Telegram’s appeal to different audiences illustrates the dilemma we face - how to protect freedom of expression when the same tools that provide that freedom are abused by terrorist groups.

Although there is no evidence that Telegram has been used to orchestrate the Paris attacks – and top leaders of Isis are unlikely to trust social media for their murderous plots – the increasing use of encrypted platforms by terrorists groups has been troubling intelligence and law-enforcement officials. The arguments over encryption are likely to heat up after the carnage in Paris.

People who keep a close watch on Isis’ social media output argue that some of the risks of abuse can be mitigated with closer policing.

They point out that Isis channels were easily identifiable and could have been blocked by Telegram. Ms Katz has been following dozens of jihadi groups’ channels for the past two months and the first time Telegram acted was in the aftermath of the Paris attacks when it blocked 78 ISIS and jihadi-related channels. Since then, however, she has noted that Isis-related channels have reappeared on the service.

The policing, however, only goes so far: alternative Isis-related Telegram channels have already appeared. No doubt Isis’ propaganda machine is also busily scouring for the next social media target to spread its poison.

- Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015