The core principle is everyone in there is anonymous we don't want to know each other’s identities we don't share personal information and assume that you're always being watched by law enforcement. This is the reality for violent extremist movements on telegram. Studies have shown that anonymity is core to the participation in ecosystems especially those who share controversial sensitive or extremist content. Nevertheless, their behaviours change when they do believe that they are protected by some type of encryption as well as being by the anonymous nature of their accounts. Telegram does offer and end to end encryption in one-on-one conversations however, the perception of protection transfers to users who are in public channels or public groups though they are not actually fully protected. In this case, Telegram bills itself as a secure alternative to messaging applications. They had no choice but to hide some of these views as they had to abide by the rules of the platforms they inhabited like Twitter and Facebook. Now this is difficult to determine as radicalization is an individualistic process, however, telegram provides opportunities for this to occur.Īnother possibility is that the ecosystems permitted influencers from QAnon to shed the veneer they had covering their more extremist beliefs or views they may have had prior to being deplatformed.
Adding onto this the psychological and emotional impact of what happened between November 2020 and January 2021, there are plenty of environmental factors combined with new extremist material that could lead an individual to become radicalized. It is important to remember that many of these individuals may have been extremists, but they were not violent extremists, nor were they used to the type of content and propaganda that was already present in ecosystems on Telegram. When individuals initially joined telegram in January 2021, they were introduced to a host of content that they were not privy to on other platforms. This behaviour was inevitable in the way as ecosystems easily share content across the board in the spaces and the large influx of new users that appeared in these ecosystems following January 2021 created plenty of opportunities for extremists and “Parler and Twitter refugees” to engage with content they might not have been before.
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