antifainternational:

Telegram is finally cracking down on neonazi and other fascist groups on its’ platform. Some excerpts from the article:

In March 2019, amid the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre, the far right made a collective migration from an array of messenger platforms and discussion boards to the messaging app Telegram. On their new home—the same one ISIS adopted as its digital headquarters in 2015—neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups steadily grew their audiences by the thousands. The Russian-founded, UK-based Telegram connected different far-right communities, helping to bring far more organization to the movement as a whole. […]

But amid emerging stories of neo-Nazi National Guard and Army personnel networking and plotting attacks on Telegram, the company is now taking thorough action against some of the most prominent and violence-promoting entities on its platform. […]

It was the first shockwave sent through the far right, and the community started sounding the alarm that Telegram was “cracking down” on them. One message distributed across the community was accompanied by a screenshot compilation of channels that had already been removed, warning:

“… 10 channels deleted without warning, no restrictions, nothing; just straight out deleted … Additionally the channel owners for some of them have been perma-banned from making channels or messaging in groups.” Posts included lists and images of the deleted channels.

With the panic came signals of desperation. Breaking precedent, the administrator of Terrorwave Refined began begging others for help, going as far as offering Bitcoin payments to anyone who could find a way to bring the channel and its followers back intact.

Telegram had truly hit a nerve. The place that had been such a reliable safe haven for the far right was becoming unignorably hostile. [..]
Within these messages was an implicit admission of how reliant they were on Telegram. […]

These developments from the far right are like a repeat of how things played out for ISIS. After the 2015 Paris attacks brought heightened outrage about Telegram’s role in housing ISIS, the company gradually cracked down harder and harder on the group, forcing it to embrace private channels, expiring invite links, and other operations security measures. ISIS was in a constant chess game with Telegram, integrating messaging bots, channel-styled chat groups, and other manipulated features toward an increasingly complicated infrastructure. Though the group tried other platforms to set up base on, all roads always led back to Telegram.

Then, this past November, Telegram finally launched a highly effective assault on its ISIS userbase. The company didn’t just hit the channels and chat groups but also the administrators and users therein, sending ISIS operatives in disarray to rebuild and locate their contacts, whom they didn’t have lines without outside of Telegram.

Five years after embracing the platform, ISIS’ Telegram presence is now a shell of what it once was. Some ISIS operatives are still there, but the group no longer has a central home, and its operations are scattered across different platforms like Hoop, a Canada-based messenger platform. This diffuseness is more than a disruption for ISIS. It’s also a vulnerability: The more platforms ISIS and its community have to move between, the more cracks there are to infiltrate it.