The German expert center Jugendschutz.net (created by the federal and state governments to protect children and adolescents on the Internet) has published a report “Telegram: Between the propaganda of violence and the information war,” Kommersant report.
In the report, the center’s experts note that Telegram has recently been playing the role of one of the main places of extremist propaganda on the right, and that the messenger administration is doing quite a bit to combat such content.
According to the report, the number of groups with right-extremist, racist, anti-Semitic and other content on Telegram, as well as the number of participants in such groups is growing – such an increase has been observed since 2017, but a particularly strong increase occurred last year. In one of the most popular channels with propaganda of extremist views in German, about 120 thousand participants. Right-wing extremists use the messenger as an alternative platform, a means of communication and dissemination of their views, as well as an archive for propaganda materials. “Telegram has become one of the important nodal points where right-wing extremists of different spectra meet,” the report said.
According to the authors of the report, the administration of the messenger not only does not take active measures to combat such content, but also responds rather weakly to user complaints.
Researchers at Jugendschutz.net have filed complaints about 200 posts of “apparently illegal, extremist extremist content” on Telegram – for example, inciting ethnic hatred, racist or anti-Semitic. As a result, only 11% of such posts were deleted, the remaining posts remained in place.
