The platform, now based in Dubai, has minimal content moderation aside from a stated commitment to taking down illegal pornography, IP rights violations, scams, and calls for violence. “It is the idea that everyone on this planet has a right to be free.” “For us, Telegram is an idea,” Durov has said. In the decade since its founding in Russia, Telegram has grown to become one of the biggest social networks in the world, with 700 million users-yet only about 60 core employees. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what’s really happening to people’s accounts-whether spyware or Kremlin informants have been used to break in, through no particular fault of the company whether Telegram really is cooperating with Moscow or whether it’s such an inherently unsafe platform that the latter is merely what appears to be going on. These cases have set off a swirl of conspiracy theories, paranoia, and speculation among dissidents, whose trust in Telegram has plummeted. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”-Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature-behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases.
Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Matsapulina’s case is hardly an isolated one, though it is especially unsettling. The other “unpleasant” explanation, she wrote, “is, I think, obvious to everyone.” Russians needed to consider the possibility that Telegram, the supposedly antiauthoritarian app cofounded by the mercurial Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, was now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests. Based on what she’d gathered, the expensive software was reserved for high-level targets and was not likely to have been turned on a mid-level figure in an unregistered party with about 1,000 members nationwide.
One was that they had installed some kind of malware, like the NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus tool, on her phone. She ruled out the chance that anyone in her close-knit group had been cooperating with security forces (they’d all also left Russia by then), which left two conceivable explanations for how the officers had read her private Telegram messages. In April, after having made it safely to Armenia, Matsapulina recounted the episode in a Twitter thread. Sign up for our Longreads newsletter for the best features, ideas, and investigations from WIRED.
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