Neo-Nazis Are Fleeing Telegram for Encrypted App SimpleX Chat

October 5, 2024:

Poberezkin claims SimpleX has the ability to prevent the distribution of child sexual abuse material on servers that it controls, though users can also set up their own servers on the network.

However, Poberezkin says SimpleX doesn’t indiscriminately scan all content because of a European Court of Human Rights decision in February of this year, which ruled that forcing encrypted messaging apps to provide a backdoor to law enforcement was illegal. This decision undermined the EU’s controversial proposal that would potentially force encrypted messaging apps to scan all user content for identifiers of child sexual abuse material.

But if a “group entry point is publicly promoted and can be joined, and it uses the servers that we operate, we can remove these entry points and the files from the servers,” Poberezkin says. “A very important quality of the SimpleX network is that users cannot be approached unless they want to be. It protects the users from any hostile actors and unwanted promotions.”

For years, neo-Nazi groups have flourished on Telegram, many of them under the assumption that Telegram was a fully encrypted platform that provided a greater level of security than it really did. Telegram was used by these groups for building out their networks, sharing propaganda, and planning attacks.

However, law enforcement arrested and charged what it said were two leaders of the Terrorgram Collective last month, which was a key factor in triggering the migration to SimpleX, the ISD analysts wrote.

“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,” Marc-André Argentino, a senior research fellow at the Accelerationism Research Consortium, wrote last month in an analysis also discussing the migration of extremists from Telegram to the new platform. “SimpleX offers end-to-end encryption by default for all messages, whereas Telegram only encrypts conversations in its ‘secret chats.’”

Poberezkin says that SimpleX is “100 percent private by design” and that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t access information about user IP addresses. Another key privacy aspect of the app is that, unlike most other encrypted chat apps, SimpleX does not require users to enter a phone number or email to register for an account—removing one of the key ways that law enforcement can track down users on other platforms.

“SimpleX, at its core, is designed to be truly distributed with no central server. This allows for enormous scalability at low cost, and also makes it virtually impossible to snoop on the network graph,” Poberezkin wrote in a company blog post published in 2021.

SimpleX’s policies expressly prohibit “sending illegal communications” and outline how SimpleX will remove such content if it is discovered. Much of the content that these terrorist groups have shared on Telegram—and are already resharing on SimpleX—has been deemed illegal in the UK, Canada, and Europe.

Argentino wrote in his analysis that discussion about moving from Telegram to platforms with better security measures began in June, with discussion of SimpleX as an option taking place in July among a number of extremist groups. Though it wasn’t until September, and the Terrorgram arrests, that the decision was made to migrate to SimpleX, the groups are already establishing themselves on the new platform.

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