by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and James Bandler, ProPublica
This story contains references to homophobia, antisemitism and racism, as well as mass shootings and other violence.
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On Jan. 19, 2024, the sheriff of Jacksonville, Florida, released a 27-page manifesto left behind by Ryan Palmeter, a 21-year old white man who had murdered three Black people at a Dollar General store before turning the gun on himself.
The Florida Times-Union, a prominent local news outlet, said it would not be publishing the document, which it said used the N-word 183 times and had an “overall theme of white superiority.” T.K. Waters, the sheriff, said he had posted what he described as the “rantings of an isolated, hateful, madman” to keep his promise of public transparency. An attorney for one of the victims’ families urged the public “to not give Palmeter the satisfaction of publishing or distributing his manifesto,” saying it “contains not one redeemable thought.”
Dallas Humber
(Illustration for ProPublica)
Thousands of miles away, in Elk Grove, California, Dallas Humber saw Palmeter’s view of the world as perfect for her audience of online neo-Nazis. Humber, a now-35-year-old woman with a penchant for dyeing her hair neon colors, was a leading voice in an online network of white supremacists who had coalesced in a dark corner of Telegram, a social media and messaging service with almost a billion users worldwide.
She and her comrades called this constellation of interlocking Telegram accounts Terrorgram. Their shared goal was to topple modern democracies through terrorism and sabotage and then replace them with all-white ethno-states.
Humber quickly turned Palmeter’s slur-riddled manifesto into an audiobook that she narrated in a monotone. Then she sent it into the world with her signature line:
“So, let’s get this party started, Terrorbros.”
The manifesto immediately began to spread, pinballing around the worldwide Terrorgram scene, which celebrated mass shooters like Palmeter as “saints.”
The Terrorgram story is part of a much larger 21st century phenomenon. Over the past two decades, massive social networks like X, Facebook and Telegram have emerged as a powerful force for both good and evil. The ability to connect with like-minded strangers helped fuel uprisings like the Arab Spring and Iran’s pro-democracy movements. But it has also aided extremists, including brutal jihadist organizations like the Islamic State group and white supremacists around the world.
About This Partnership
This story is part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica that includes an upcoming documentary, “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram,” which premieres March 25 at 10 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. CDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream on YouTube, the PBS App and FRONTLINE’s website.
Telegram, which is massively popular outside of the U.S., boasted an array of features that appealed to Humber and her fellow Terrorgammers. They could send encrypted direct messages, start big chat groups and create public channels to broadcast their messages. In the span of five years, they grew Terrorgram from a handful of accounts into a community with hundreds of chats and channels focused on recruiting would-be terrorists, sharing grisly videos and trading expertise on everything from assassination techniques to the best ways to sabotage water systems and electrical transmission lines. On one of her many accounts, Humber posted step-by-step instructions for making pipe bombs and synthesizing HMTD, a potent explosive.
Humber went by a series of usernames but was eventually publicly exposed by a group of California activists. ProPublica and FRONTLINE reviewed chat logs — some provided by the Australian anti-facist research organization The White Rose Society — court records and Humber’s other digital accounts to independently confirm her identity.
U.S. prosecutors say Humber helped lead the Terrorgram Collective, a transnational organization that ran popular Terrorgram accounts, produced sophisticated works of propaganda and distributed an alleged hit list of potential assassination targets. She is currently facing a host of federal terrorism charges, along with another alleged Terrorgram leader, Matthew Allison, a 38-year-old DJ from Boise, Idaho. Both have pleaded not guilty.
To trace the rise and fall of Terrorgram, ProPublica and FRONTLINE obtained a trove of chat logs and got access to some of the extremists’ private channels, allowing reporters to track in real time their posts and relationships. We combed through legal documents, talked with law enforcement officials and researchers in six countries and interviewed a member of the collective in jail. Taken together, our reporting reveals new details about the Terrorgram Collective, showing how Humber and her compatriots were powerful social media influencers who, rather than peddling fashion or food, promoted murder and destruction.
“The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram,” part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica, premieres March 25.
The material illustrates the tension faced by every online platform: What limits should be imposed on the things users post or discuss? For years, social networks like Facebook and X employed thousands of people to review and take down offensive content, from pornography to racist memes to direct incitement of violence. The efforts at content moderation prompted complaints, primarily from conservatives, that the platforms were censoring conservative views of the world.
Telegram was created in 2013 by Pavel Durov, a Russian-born technologist, and his brother Nikolai. Pavel Durov, a billionaire who posts pictures of himself on Instagram, baring his chiseled torso amid rock formations and sand dunes, became the face of the company. He marketed the platform as a free-speech-focused alternative to the Silicon Valley social media platforms, which in the mid-2010s had begun aggressively policing disinformation and racist and dehumanizing content. Telegram’s restrictions were far more lax than those of its competitors, and it quickly became a hub for hate as well as illegal activity like child sexual exploitation and gunrunning.
Our review of thousands of Terrorgram posts shows that the lack of content moderation was crucial to the spread of the collective’s violent content. Telegram’s largely hands-off approach allowed Humber and her alleged confederates to reach an international audience of disaffected young people.
They encouraged these followers to turn their violent thoughts into action. And some of them did.
ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified 35 crimes linked to Terrorgram, including bomb plots, stabbings and shootings. Each case involved an individual who posted in Terrorgram chats, followed Terrorgram accounts or was a member of an organized group whose leaders participated in the Terrorgram community.
One of the crimes was a 2022 shooting at an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, that left two people dead and another injured. In an earlier story, ProPublica and FRONTLINE detailed how the shooter, Juraj Krajčík, was coached to kill over three years by members of the Terrorgram Collective, a process that started when he was just 16 years old.
Radka Trokšiarová survived the Bratislava attack after being shot twice in the leg. “Sometimes I catch myself wishing to be able to ask the gunman: ‘Why did you do it? What was the point and purpose of destroying so many lives?’” she said.
Telegram declined repeated requests to make its executives available for interviews and would not answer specific questions about Humber and other Terrorgram leaders. But in a statement, the company said, “Calls for violence from any group are not tolerated on our platform.”
The company said that Telegram’s “significant growth has presented unique moderation challenges due to the sheer volume and diversity of content uploaded to the platform,” but that since 2023 it has stepped up its moderation practices, using AI and a team of about 750 contractors. Telegram said it now “proactively monitors public content across the platform and takes down objectionable content before it reaches users and has a chance to be reported.”
Excerpt from “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram”
(FRONTLINE)
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Right-wing extremists were flocking to Telegram by 2019.
Many had been effectively exiled from major social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which, in response to public pressure, had built vast “trust and safety” teams tasked with purging hateful and violent content. The companies had also begun using a shared database of hashes — essentially digital fingerprints — to quickly identify and delete videos and images produced by terror groups.
Even 8chan, an anonymous message board frequented by extremists, had begun pulling down particularly egregious posts and videos. Users there openly discussed moving to Telegram. One lengthy thread encouraged white supremacists to start using Telegram as a tool for communicating with like-minded people and spreading radical ideas to those they considered “normies.” “It offers a clean UI” — user interface — “and the best privacy protection we can get for this sort of social,” wrote one 8chan poster.
Pavel Durov, the 40-year-old Telegram co-founder, had positioned himself as a stalwart champion of privacy and free expression, arguing that “privacy is more important than the fear of terrorism.” After the Iranian government blocked access to the app in that country in 2018, he called free speech an “undeniable human right.”
To the extremists, Telegram and Durov seemed to be promising to leave them and their posts alone — no matter how offensive and alarming others might find their messages.
Among those who joined the online migration were Pavol Beňadik and Matthew Althorpe. The two men quickly began testing Telegram’s limits by posting content explicitly aimed at inspiring acts of white supremacist terrorism.
Then 23, Althorpe came from a small town on the Niagara River in Ontario, Canada; Beňadik, who was 19 at the time, lived in a village in Western Slovakia and went by the online handle Slovakbro.
Both were believers in a doctrine called militant accelerationism, which has become popular with neo-Nazis over the past decade, the chat logs show. Militant accelerationists want to speed the collapse of society by committing destabilizing terrorist attacks and mass killings. They have frequently targeted their perceived enemies, including people of color, Muslims, Jews, gays and lesbians.
Telegram gave them the ability to share tactics and targets with thousands of potential terrorists around the globe. Day after day they urged their followers to go out and kill as many people as possible to advance the white supremacist cause.
Pavol Beňadik
(Illustration for ProPublica)
Beňadik had been immersed in the extremist scene since at least 2017, bouncing from one online space to the next, a review of his online life shows. He’d spent time on Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Gab and 4chan, another low-moderation message board.
Beňadik would later tell authorities that he was inspired by Christopher Cantwell, a New Hampshire white supremacist known as the “Crying Nazi” for posting a video of himself sobbing after learning that he might be arrested for his actions during the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. From Slovakia, Beňadik listened to Cantwell’s podcast, which featured long racist diatribes and interviews with white nationalist figures like Richard Spencer.
By 2019, Beňadik had created a chat group on Telegram in which he encouraged his followers to firebomb businesses, torch the homes of antifascists and seek out radioactive material to build dirty bombs and detonate them in American cities.
Althorpe started a channel and uploaded a steady stream of violent propaganda, the Telegram chat logs show. He named his channel Terrorwave Refined.
“Direct action against the system,” Althorpe argued in one post, is “the ONLY path toward total aryan victory.” Althorpe often shared detailed material that could aid in carrying out terrorist attacks, such as instructions for making the explosive thermite and plans for building assault rifles that couldn’t be traced by law enforcement.
Other sizable social media platforms or online forums would have detected and deleted the material posted by Althorpe and Beňadik. But on Telegram, the posts stayed up.
Soon others were creating similar content. In the summer of 2019, the duo began circulating online flyers listing allied Telegram chat groups and channels. Early on the network was small, just seven accounts.
Beňadik and Althorpe began calling this new community Terrorgram. The moniker stuck.
“I decided to become a fucking content producer,” Beňadik would later say on a podcast called HateLab, which has since been deleted. “I saw a niche and I decided to fill it.”
They were becoming influencers.
At the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, a gunman attacked worshippers in 2019, killing dozens.
(FRONTLINE)
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As the pair grew their audience on Telegram, they studied a massacre that had occurred a few months earlier in New Zealand.
A heavily armed man had murdered 51 Muslims at two mosques, livestreaming the carnage from a GoPro camera strapped to his ballistic helmet. To explain his motivations, Brenton Tarrant had drafted a 74-page treatise arguing that white people were being wiped out in an ongoing genocide. He described the Muslim worshippers he murdered as “invaders” and invoked a conspiracy theory claiming they were part of a plot to replace people of European ancestry with nonwhite people.
Tarrant’s slaughter had sent a surge of fear through New Zealand society. And his written and visual propaganda, which was aimed at inspiring more violence, had spread widely. Researchers would later discover that more than 12,000 copies of the video had been posted online in the 24 hours after the massacre.
Within the Terrorgram community, Tarrant became an icon.
On Telegram, Beňadik and Althorpe dubbed him a “saint” — an honorific they bestowed on someone who killed in the name of the white supremacist movement.
The two men saw Tarrant’s crime as a template for future attacks. Over and over, the duo encouraged their subscribers to follow Tarrant’s example and become the next saint.
For extremism researchers, the rise of the Terrorgram community was alarming. “Neo-Nazis, white nationalists and antigovernment extremists are publishing volumes of propaganda advocating terrorism and mass shootings on Telegram,” warned an investigator with the Southern Poverty Law Center in June 2019. The investigator said he was unable to even reach anyone at Telegram at the time to discuss the matter.
By August 2019, the Terrorgram network had grown to nearly 20 chat groups and channels. The Terrorwave Refined channel had ballooned to over 2,000 subscribers. “Thanks to everyone who helped us hit 2,000!” wrote Althorpe in a post. “HAIL THE SAINTS. HAIL HOLY TERROR.”
In addition to his chat groups, Beňadik created an array of channels to distribute propaganda and guides to weaponry and explosives. One of the most popular attracted nearly 5,000 subscribers.
“He was, I would say, a key architect behind Terrorgram,” said Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department. Weiner’s unit spent years monitoring the Terrorgram scene and assisted the FBI in investigating cases linked to the community.
When compared to mainstream social media, the numbers were tiny. But looked at a different way, they were stunning: Althorpe and Beňadik had built an online community of thousands of people dedicated to celebrating and committing acts of terrorism.
One of them was Jarrett Smith, a U.S. Army private based at Fort Riley in Kansas who was a regular in Beňadik’s chat group during the fall of 2019.
A beefy guy who enjoyed posting photos of himself in military gear, Smith had a love of explosives — he urged his fellow Terrorgrammers to bomb electric power stations, cell towers and natural gas lines — and contempt for federal law enforcement agents. “Feds deserve to be shot. They are the enemy,” he wrote in one chat thread.
Days after making the post, Smith unknowingly began communicating with a federal agent who was posing as an extremist.
In a string of direct messages, the undercover agent asked for Smith’s help in assassinating government officials in Texas. “Got a liberal texas mayor in my sights!” wrote the agent.
Happy to oblige, Smith provided the agent with a detailed step-by-step guide to building a potent improvised explosive device capable of destroying a car, as well as how-tos for several other types of bombs.
He was arrested that September and later pleaded guilty to charges that he shared instructions for making bombs and homemade napalm. Smith was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
The Terrorgram community was becoming a significant concern for law enforcement.
An October 2019 intelligence bulletin noted: “Telegram has become increasingly popular with WSEs” — white supremacist extremists — “due to frequent suspensions and censorship of their accounts across multiple social media platforms. Currently, WSEs are able to maintain relatively extensive networks of public channels some of which have thousands of members with minimal disruptions.”
The bulletin was produced by the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, an intelligence-sharing center staffed by federal, state and local law enforcement personnel. Today, that five-page document — which was not meant for public dissemination — seems prescient.
It noted that while jihadist organizations and white supremacists were posting similar content on the platform, Telegram was treating the two camps in “vastly different” ways. The company, which had been headquartered in the United Arab Emirates since 2017, routinely shut down accounts created by the Islamic State group but it would “rarely remove WSE content, and typically only for high-profile accounts or posts that have received extensive media attention.”
By 2020, a pattern emerged: When Telegram did take down an account, it was often quickly replaced by a new one — sometimes with a near-identical name.
When the company deleted Althorpe’s Terrorwave Refined channel, he simply started a new one called Terrorwave Revived and began posting the same material. Within seven hours, he had attracted 1,000 followers, according to a post he wrote at the time.
The Terrorgrammers saw the modest attempts at content moderation as a betrayal by Pavel Durov and Telegram. “You could do anything on 2019 Telegram,” wrote Beňadik in a 2021 post. “I told people how to plan a genocide,” he said, noting that the company did nothing about those posts.
Apple, Google and Microsoft distribute the Telegram app through their respective online stores, giving them a measure of control over what their users could see on the platform. As the Terrorgram community attracted more notice from the outside world, including extremism researchers and law enforcement, these tech giants began restricting certain Terrorgram chats and channels, making them impossible to view.
Still, the Terrorgrammers found ways to evade the blackouts and shared the work-arounds with their followers. The network eventually grew to include hundreds of chats and channels.
The Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, a German organization that studies online extremism, “has tracked about 400 channels and 200 group chats which are considered part of the Terrorgram community on Telegram,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher with the center.
As the content spread, so did crime. Using court records, news clips and Telegram data collected by Open Measures, a research platform that monitors social media, ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified a string of crimes tied to Terrorgram.
Nicholas Welker, who was active in the Terrorgram community, is serving a 44-month prison sentence for making death threats toward a Brooklyn-based journalist reporting on a neo-Nazi group.
A Missouri man who planned to blow up a hospital with a vehicle bomb was killed during a shootout with FBI agents in 2020; his neo-Nazi organization had posted in Beňadik’s chat group and was using it to enlist new members.
The most deadly known crime stemming from Terrorgram occurred in 2022 Brazil, where a teenager who was allegedly in contact with Humber shot 15 people, killing four. The teen was later hailed as a saint by the Terrorgrammers.
Excerpt from “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram”
(FRONTLINE)
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While Terrorgram started as a loose collection of chats and channels, by 2021 Althorpe and Beňadik had created a more formal organization, according to Canadian court records and interviews with law enforcement sources in Slovakia. Their small, clandestine group was the Terrorgram Collective.
The organization began producing more sophisticated content — books, videos and a roster of alleged assassination targets — and distributing the material to thousands of followers.
Court documents, a U.S. State Department bulletin and Telegram logs show that over the next three years, the collective would come to include at least six other people in five countries.
Over 14 months, the group generated three books and repeatedly posted them in PDF form on Terrorgram accounts. Ranging in length from 136 to 268 pages, the books offer a raft of specific advice for planning a terror attack, including how to sabotage railroads, electrical substations and other critical infrastructure. The publications also celebrated a pantheon of white supremacist saints — mass murderers including Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
“That combination of tactical guidance plus propaganda is something that we’d seen a lot of coming out of ISIS in years past,” said Weiner of the NYPD. She added that the books are filled with “splashy graphics” designed to appeal to young people.
“It’s a real manual on how to commit an act of terrorism,” Jakub Gajdoš, who helped oversee an investigation of Beňadik and Terrorgram for Slovakia’s federal police agency, said of one book. “A guide for killing people.”
At least two Americans were involved in creating one of the books, according to U.S. federal prosecutors: Humber and Allison, the DJ from Boise, Idaho. The chat logs show they were both prolific creators and influencers in the Terrorgram community who frenetically generated new content, including videos, audiobooks, graphics and calendars, which they posted on an array of channels.
Allison made around 120 Terrorgram videos, including editing “White Terror,” a quasi-documentary glorifying more than 100 white murderers and terrorists. Narrated by Humber, the video starts with the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and concludes with the young man who shot and killed 10 Black shoppers in a Buffalo supermarket in 2022.
These “white men and women of action have taken it upon themselves to wage war against the system and our racial enemies,” Humber intones. “To the saints of tomorrow watching this today, know that when you succeed you will be celebrated with reverence and your sacrifice will not be in vain.”
The pair also allegedly helped create “The List,” a detailed hit list of American politicians, corporate executives, academics and others, according to court documents. The List was shared on a series of dedicated Telegram channels, as well as an array of other accounts, some made to look like legitimate news aggregators. Each entry included a photo of the target and their home address.
It was an escalation — and from court documents it’s clear that The List captured the attention of U.S. law enforcement agents, who worried that it might trigger a wave of assassinations.
In 2022, a gunman attacked an LGBTQ+ bar in the Old Town neighborhood of Bratislava, Slovakia.
(FRONTLINE)
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The collective’s books influenced a new generation of armed extremists, some of them in their teens.
One of these young disciples was Juraj Krajčík. The Slovakian student had joined Beňadik’s chat groups at the age of 16 and had become a frequent poster.
ProPublica and FRONTLINE obtained an extensive trove of Terrorgram chat logs that show how Beňadik mentored Krajčík and played a profound role in shaping his beliefs. Over the span of three years, Beňadik, Allison and Humber all urged the teen to take action, the chat logs show.
On the night of Oct. 12, 2022, Krajčík, armed with a handgun, opened fire on three people outside of Tepláreň, a small LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava’s Old Town neighborhood, killing Juraj Vankulič and Matúš Horváth and wounding their friend Radka Trokšiarová.
“I was in terrible pain because the bullet went through my thighbone,” she recalled. “I am still in pain.”
Krajčík took off on foot, and hours later he killed himself in a grove of trees next to a busy roadway. He was 19.
Six thousand miles away in California, Humber promptly began making celebratory posts. Krajčík, she exclaimed, had achieved sainthood.
Shortly after the Bratislava attack, Humber messaged Allison on Telegram, according to court records recently filed by federal prosecutors in the U.S.
She told him she’d been communicating with another Terrorgrammer who was planning a racially motivated school shooting.The attack occurred weeks later in Aracruz, Brazil, when a 16-year-old wearing a skull mask shot 15 people at two schools, killing four. Another saint.
On a Terrogram channel, Humber posted a ZIP file with info on the attack, including 17 photos and four videos. The massacre, she noted, was motivated by “Hatred of non-Whites.” And she made a pitch tailored for the next would-be teenage terrorist: The assailant, she wrote in a post, would get a “SLAP ON THE WRIST” prison sentence due to his age.
While Krajčík was planning his attack, law enforcement agencies in Europe, the U.S. and Canada were quietly pursuing the leaders of the Terrorgram Collective.
Beňadik was the first to fall. Using information collected by the FBI, investigators in Slovakia arrested him in May 2022 while he was on break from college. He’d been studying computer science at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic.
While in jail, Beňadik admitted his involvement with Terrorgram. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years in prison shortly after the Tepláreň attacks.
Describing Beňadik as “extremely intelligent,” prosecutor Peter Kysel said he believes the student never met with any of his fellow Terrorgrammers in person and didn’t even know their real names. “All the contacts was in the cyberspace,” he said.
But Beňadik misled investigators about his connection to Krajčík, saying they had one brief interaction, via direct message. “This was the only communication,” said Daniel Lipšic, the prosecutor who investigated the Tepláreň attack.
In fact, Beňadik and Krajčík had many conversations, the logs obtained by ProPublica and FRONTLINE show. The pair repeatedly discussed targeting Tepláreň, with the older man writing that killing the bar patrons with a nail bomb wasn’t brutal enough. Krajčík posted frequently about his animus toward gays and lesbians, which Beňadik encouraged.
Alleged Terrorgram Collective co-founder Althorpe is also in custody. Canadian prosecutors have accused him of helping to produce the Terrorgram Collective publications, through which they say he “promoted genocide” and “knowingly instructed” others to carry out “terrorist activity.”
At the time of his arrest, Althorpe was running a small company selling components for semi-automatic rifles such as AK-47s and AR-15s. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
In the U.S., Humber and Allison are facing trial on charges including soliciting people to kill government officials through The List, distributing bomb-making instructions and providing material support to terrorists. Prosecutors say the two have been involved with the Terrorgram community since 2019.
The 37-page indictment says they incited the attack on Tepláreň, noting that Krajčík “had frequent conversations with HUMBER, ALLISON, and other members of the Terrorgram Collective” before carrying out the crime.
In a jailhouse interview that Allison gave against his lawyer’s advice, he admitted he produced content for the collective, including editing the “White Terror” video. Still, Allison insisted he never incited others to commit crimes and claimed The List wasn’t meant to be a guide for assassins. He said it was merely an exercise in doxxing, similar to how right-wing activists are outed by anti-fascist activists.
All of his Telegram posts are protected under the First Amendment, according to a motion filed by his lawyers. They argue that while he was active in Telegram chats and channels, there is nothing in the government’s evidence to support the claim that he was a Terrorgram leader. “The chats are mostly a chaotic mix of hyperbole and posts without any recognized leader,” his lawyers wrote in the motion.
Looking pale and grim, Humber declined to be interviewed when ProPublica and FRONTLINE visited the Sacramento County Jail. Her attorney declined to comment on the case.
During the last days of the Biden administration, in January 2025, the State Department officially designated the Terrorgram Collective a global terrorist organization, hitting three more collective leaders in South Africa, Croatia and Brazil with sanctions. In February, Australia announced its own sanctions on Terrorgram, the first time that country’s government has imposed counterterrorism financing sanctions on an organization that is entirely based online.
“The group has been majorly impacted in terms of its activity. We’ve seen many chats being voluntarily closed as people feel at risk of legal action, and we’ve seen generally the amount of discourse really reducing,” said Milo Comerford, an extremism expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that tracks hate groups and disinformation. The “organizational capabilities of the Terrorgram Collective itself have been severely undermined.”
Pavel Durov
(Illustration for ProPublica)
The demise of Terrorgram has coincided with reforms announced at Telegram in the wake of one co-founder’s arrest last year in France. Pavel Durov is charged with allowing criminal activity, including drug trafficking and child sexual abuse, to flourish on his platform. He has called the charges “misguided,” saying CEOs should not be held liable for the misuse of their platforms. He was ordered to remain in France during the ongoing investigation, and, depending on the outcome, could face trial next year.
In a statement, the company said, “Mr. Durov firmly denies all allegations.”
The company said it has always complied with the European Union’s laws. “It is absurd to suggest that Telegram’s owner is responsible for the actions of a negligible fraction (<0.01%) of its 950M+ active users.”
Still, after the arrest, the company announced a slew of reforms designed to make Telegram safer. It promised to police illegal content on the platform and share the IP addresses and phone numbers of alleged lawbreakers with authorities.
In response, white supremacists began to flee the platform.
Pete Simi, a sociology professor who studies extremism at Chapman University in Orange, California, said the incendiary ideas promoting race war and violence that animated the Terrorgram Collective will migrate to other platforms. “Especially given the broader climate that exists within our society,” Simi said. “There will be new Terrorgrams that take its place by another name, and we will continue to see this kind of extremism propagated through platforms of various sorts, not just Telegram.”
Today, many extremists are gathering on X, where owner Elon Musk has loosened content restrictions. White supremacists frequently post a popular Terrorgram slogan about killing all Black people. There are several Brenton Tarrant fan accounts, and some racist and antisemitic influencers who were previously banned now have hundreds of thousands of followers.
A review by ProPublica and FRONTLINE shows the company is removing some violent white supremacist content and suspending some extremist accounts. It also restricts the visibility of some racist and hateful posts by excluding them from search results or by adding a note to the post saying it violates X’s rules of community conduct. And we were unable to find posts on the platform that shared the bomb-making and terrorism manuals that had previously appeared on Telegram. The news organizations reached out to X multiple times but got no response.
In early March, a person who had a history of posting Nazi imagery shared a 21-second video lionizing Juraj Krajčík. The clip shows one of his victims lying dead on the pavement.
Tom Jennings, Annie Wong, Karina Meier and Max Maldonado of FRONTLINE, and Lukáš Diko of the Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak contributed reporting.
This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and James Bandler, ProPublica.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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