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Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok all scrubbed Russia’s RT — and its channels in English, Spanish, French and German — off their platforms after the European Union imposed sanctions on the Kremlin-backed media network.
But these organizations, which are pushing Russian falsehoods and talking points about the war in Ukraine, are alive and kicking on Telegram, the encrypted messenger, even after the company said it had taken steps to block them within the 27-country bloc.
Europe’s sanctions require RT to be removed from television broadcasts, video-sharing platforms, internet service providers and a litany of other digital networks in an effort to prevent falsehoods peddled by Moscow from reaching a large, mostly online, audience. But on Telegram, these outlets still have free rein within the 27-country bloc.
RT’s outlets across multiple languages have, collectively, amassed an audience of over a million subscribers via their Telegram channels that are still available across the EU. Some outlets have garnered double-digit increases in followers since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, based on POLITICO’s analysis of these networks. Disinformation experts also say Western far-right groups and conspiracy theorists have used Kremlin-backed disinformation to undermine the West’s support for Ukraine.
On RT France, the outlet questioned how Europe’s economy would survive after imposing sanctions on Russia. On RT Deutsch, Vladimir Putin’s invasion was reframed to falsely claim it was aimed at “denazifying” Ukraine’s military. On RT en Español, Kyiv’s forces were accused of carrying out atrocities against civilians in the country’s two breakaway “republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk. Similar falsehoods were also routinely shared, both in English and Russian, within official RT Telegram channels with hundreds of thousands of followers.
“The rules are clear. There cannot be any circumvention,” said Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, in response to written questions from POLITICO, adding that it was up to member countries to take action against those who had not complied with the sanctions. “All actors should take their responsibilities. First, because it is the law in the EU. Second, everyone has understood what is at stake by now.”
France has so far banned RT’s French outpost from operating within its borders, but media regulators have been slow to respond to its activities.
In a statement, Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn said the social network had now barred Kremlin-backed media outlets from using its platform within the EU. “The process is now completed and all RT channels are blocked,” he said. But POLITICO was still able to access many, but not all, of these channels on Telegram, and Vaughn said the ban currently applied to only people who had signed into Telegram with an EU-based phone number. The companies’ engineers were expanding that to include people with non-EU phone numbers who were physically located in the bloc.
Jekyll and Hyde
Increasingly the go-to social network for far-right extremists and jihadists, Telegram has taken on a Jekyll-and-Hyde persona during the war in Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country’s president, has regularly updated his 1.3 million followers on the network with emotional messages about efforts to keep Russian forces at bay. Independent Russian media outlets have turned to the platform to post news about the war after the Kremlin throttled access to more mainstream platforms. A group of more than 300,000 pro-Ukrainian hackers is using Telegram to spread the word about potential targets within Russia.
Yet Western national security officials and Ukrainian disinformation experts also warn that large Telegram channels — with possible ties to Russia’s security services — are also spreading doctored war footage about alleged Ukrainian atrocities, false claims that Zelenskyy has fled the country and other falsehoods that go unchecked on a social media platform that has prided itself on bucking the trend of increased content moderation.
“These Telegram channels have become a very serious, a very effective tool of the disinformation machine,” said Liubov Tsybulska, founder of — and now adviser to — Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, which tracks so-called hybrid threats of both cyberattacks and disinformation targeting the country.
“Unfortunately, in Ukraine, including the occupied territories, that’s where they spread this hatred towards Ukraine and the West,” she added. “The problem with Telegram channels is that you can’t track who’s behind them.”
Growth in followers
Pavel Durov, Telegram’s Russian founder, has tried, unsuccessfully, to wade into the geopolitical crisis.
In a Russian-language message to his more than 650,000 followers on the network, the 37-year-old said that because of widespread sharing of “unverified information” about the war, the site was considering the potential removal of Telegram channels — many of which have tens of thousands of subscribers — until the end of hostilities.
But after a backlash from local users, many of whom had told him that Telegram was a source of independent news about the invasion, Durov backtracked. “I ask you to double-check and not take on faith the data that is published in Telegram channels during this difficult period,” he told his followers.
RT’s presence on Telegram — in violation of EU sanctions — has had a spillover effect within Western conspiracy theory and far-right groups, many of which are vocal in their support for Vladimir Putin.
In Germany, where the state-backed media outlet was banned in February, RT Deutsch content about Ukraine was the most frequently shared material within more than 200 far-right and conspiracy channels since the beginning of the war, according to analysis from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism.
In total, more than 1,400 links from RT Deutsch racked up 19.5 million views — between November and late February — with the vast majority of these posts either supportive of Russia’s invasion or promoting Kremlin talking points about the invasion. The Moscow-linked media outlet has also called for its readers to join its Telegram, in response to both the German and EU-wide ban, leading to a 20 percent increase in its channel’s membership, which now has more than 110,000 members.
The outlet has fostered ties with the German far right, including the Alternative for Germany political party. Many of the country’s COVID-19 conspiracy theorists and influencers, often with followings on Telegram into the hundreds of thousands, have shifted from peddling lies about the global coronavirus crisis to debunked claims promoted by the Kremlin.
“These influencers basically reposted Russian propaganda lines on the war,” said Julia Smirnova, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue analyst who conducted the research. “In Germany, Telegram is the central platform of fringe groups, especially conspiracy and far-right groups. They’ve continued to repost content from RT.”
Source: Politico
