Some far-right extremists have fled Telegram for a new haven: SimpleX, a messaging service that just secured over $1m in funding with the help of Jack Dorsey, once the CEO of Twitter, now known as X.
The migration from Telegram began after the app’s founder and chief executive, Pavel Durov, announced a crackdown on illegal content and cooperation with law enforcement requests. Just weeks ago, Durov was arrested in France on a litany of charges that allege Telegram helped spread child sexual abuse material and fuelled criminal activities among its users.
Some of those users are far-right extremists who are now avowedly nervous to use the app and have pivoted to SimpleX, an obscure secure messaging app promising unparalleled privacy and encryption options.
The app is perceived as a safer alternative and consequently gaining momentum, because it does not require any user authentication or identifications in the form of an email or phone number, which SimpleX says “radically improves your privacy”.
On its website, SimpleX claims it cannot track “your profile, contacts and metadata” hiding it from its own servers, admitting: “We don’t know how many people use our SimpleX servers.”
It even uses the example of a Mauritanian man who was wrongfully imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay for “calling a relative in Afghanistan” and says SimpleX protects against such guilt by association through protecting “the privacy of our personal networks”.
Steven Rai, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), said several extremists he monitors could see the upside of replacing Telegram with SimpleX.
“SimpleX has numerous security features that extremists view as advantageous compared to Telegram – in addition to having end-to-end encryption activated by default for all messages, it boasts being the first chat platform that circumvents the need for user IDs,” he said.
Rai continued: “On most social media platforms like Telegram, accounts are assigned a unique identifier that remains static even when users change their display name, which allows law enforcement and other investigators to track them across time and space, find out who they are communicating with, and possibly identify them.”
All of these features combined, became a selling point for far-right extremists to begin downloading SimpleX, which has the option for one-to-one messaging and broader chat groups – similar to Telegram.
“Nothing is bulletproof,” said one far-right user in a discussion on SimpleX about how the app was better than Telegram, “but [SimpleX] doesn’t need your email or phone number (unlike Telegram and such) and doesn’t store chats on their server”.
In August, the company announced more than 100,000 downloads of its Android app and that it “raised a $1.3m pre-seed round” of funding led by Dorsey and a Boston-based venture capital firm.
“Jack, we are super lucky to have your support and investment,” said the company in an online press release. “Thank you for believing in our ability to build a better messaging network!”
Dorsey had sung the praises of SimpleX on X in 2023, calling the app “promising” and potentially better than Signal, a well-known secure-messaging app considered the gold standard among privacy experts.
Neither SimpleX nor one of Dorsey’s business email addresses, responded to an emailed request for comment.
When Durov was arrested, many analysts wondered if Telegram would see a drop in usership among what’s known as Terrorgram, a designated terrorist entity in the United Kingdom that lives on the app. Terrorgram, with online operatives around the world, encourages terrorism and provides a list of targets to its followers.
But Terrorgram-adjacent propagandists immediately went about posting a list of at least 24 channels that were present on SimpleX. Some of those new SimpleX channels, mirroring Terrorgram, are ballooning their members into the hundreds.
“[Telegram] is a surveillance tool, always was and always will be,” wrote one extremist user in an open chat group on SimpleX after recently migrating there. “Don’t rely on it.”
In another neo-Nazi chat group on an extremist channel that once lived on Telegram, users discussed SimpleX as a bright new opportunity.
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“It is trustworthy,” said one user before another with a Third Reich-inspired handle began denouncing Signal.
“The problem with Signal is though it’s a non-profit company, a huge sum of its finances come from the US government agency,” said the user on SimpleX. “Pinching them is a matter of time.” Signal was founded with a grant from a government non-profit but has moved to using donations to cover its expenses.
The founder of SimpleX, Evgeny Poberezkin, is based in the UK, as is another of its listed founders, according to LinkedIn.
Already, the Base, a designated neo-Nazi terrorist organization in several countries and a number of whose members were recently arrested in the Netherlands, have appeared on the messaging app posting propaganda and contact information. The Base’s founder, who is based in Russia, advertised the group’s VK account, the Russian version of Facebook founded by Durov, on SimpleX.
“Rightwing extremist propagandists have been looking for a Telegram alternative for several years,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, analyst at the Counter Extremism Project, who first alerted the Guardian to the SimpleX migration of far-right extremists. “This is the most significant platform change for these specific, extreme, privacy-focused online white supremacist communities to date.”
Fisher-Birch said that paranoia among neo-Nazi-aligned Telegram channels and the need to find an alternative to that app, soared when US authorities announced the September arrests of two of Terrorgram’s main American operatives.
“If these current channels are allowed to remain on the SimpleX platform, it will likely signal to others that the platform is secure and a good alternative,” he said.
The near “Whac-A-Mole” game of chasing extremists on alternative social media apps is a long-running problem among national security officials trying to limit the online activities of terrorist organizations. During its heyday in 2014, Islamic State used everything from the question-and-answer site Ask.Fm to Facebook, Instagram and X as recruitment sites.
Bans on bigger apps led to Telegram eventually becoming the choice platform for most terror groups looking to find new members. Things did begin to change as the Dubai-based app came under more and more public scrutiny. As early as May 2023, IS members signaled that SimpleX could be a new haven for covert organizing.
A senior research adviser working with one of the Canadian government’s national security departments, also noticed extremists of all varieties moving to SimpleX in an all too familiar migration pattern.
“The migration of terrorists and violent extremists between online platforms isn’t unique to Telegram,” wrote Marc-André Argentino on his Substack. “For terrorists and violent extremists looking to avoid detection, SimpleX Chat provides significant advantages over Telegram, largely due to its design and features that prioritize privacy and anonymity.”