ISRAEL AT WARTerror-gram: Hamas channels on Telegram are soaring - and Israel can't do anything
ISRAEL AT WAR
Terror-gram: Hamas channels on Telegram are soaring - and Israel can't do anything
Not only does the instant messaging app, with its 800 million users, not try to filter content, it uses its absolute approach to not monitor it as a springboard to amass dominance. For example, the channel of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades has tripled in size since the beginning of the war to about 647,000 participants.
Since the war with Hamas broke out on October 7, which began when hundreds of terrorists from the terrorist organization Hamas broke through the Israeli border from the Gaza Strip and carried out a massacre of over 1,400 innocent Israeli civilians inside Israeli territory and abducted over 200 civilians to the Strip, the cyber unit at the State Attorney's Office has submitted over 11,000 requests to remove content from the technology giants. This is according to the director of the unit, Haim Wismonsky, in a hearing at the Constitutional & Judiciary Committee. "We have had success rates of about 92% from Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok," he said, mentioning that "smaller" companies are more problematic. Among these are X (formerly Twitter), and Telegram.
While the chairman of the committee, MK Simcha Rothman, tried to figure out what could be done about the remaining 8% that the prosecutor's office cannot remove, life goes on in Telegram, the instant messaging application. For its 800 million users, not only does it not try to filter content, but uses an absolute approach of not monitoring content as a springboard for gaining dominance. Anyone who wanted to know what happened early in the morning in the State of Israel on October 7, had no choice but to open one of the many Telegram channels linked to Hamas or its supporters who relied on Telegram as their main means of communication, broadcasting videos and sharing them on the application, documenting their violent invasion of Israel and the kidnapping of its citizens.
The numbers alone tell the story. The channel dedicated to the military wing of Hamas, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has tripled in size since the beginning of the war to about 647,000 participants, and each post that is shared these days gets an average of about 239,000 views. Throughout the year preceding the attack, the channel modestly grew from 182,000 subscribers to about 200,000 subscribers, with each post receiving exposure of about 25,000 views. The Gaza Now channel of Hamas had about 344,000 users before the war, and it now has 1.9 million people, the average number of views per post on this channel jumped tenfold to about 432,000 views per post. On the other hand, institutional and official organizations of the State of Israel do not gain much interest in Telegram. The official channel of the IDF spokesperson, which before the war had about 20,000 users, has jumped to about 97,000 users, but it is one of the few channels operated and maintained by Israel and receives notable attention.
The activity against Telegram to pressure it to remove channels of Hamas or its supporters is not done directly, but rather by putting pressure on Apple and Google, which control the app stores. Although neither Google nor Apple address this directly, only their attention resulted in the successful removal of several channels. Channels of the military wing of Hamas with over 700,000 users, for example, were already removed last week from Android devices and only removed in the last few days from those using iPhone devices. The effect of this removal is quite marginal. The Telegram channel of the military wing of Hamas fell from 647,000 users to about 100,000.
There are still Hamas Telegram channels with millions of users. These allow anonymity, rapid distribution through bots, and virality that no other digital platform can offer. This content, which receives enormous exposure shortly after flowing to all the other digital platforms, is a visual and violent flood with which there is no way to successfully filter completely. The company's CEO Pavel Durov makes sure to emphasize the need to keep these channels open. "Will shutting down their channel help save lives - or will it endanger more lives?" wrote Durov, who is from Russia and is based in Dubai. "While it will be easy for us to destroy this source of information, this could make an already serious situation worse," he wrote, adding that Hamas also uses Telegram messages to warn Palestinian citizens of impending attacks. Durov used to take a similar line regarding the Telegram channels maintained by ISIS. Although he received a lot of criticism for this, Durov defended his decision not to delete the terrorist group's channels. "I don't think we should feel guilty about that," Durov said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco in 2015. "Yes, there is a war in the Middle East. It's a series of tragic events, but in the end, ISIS will always find a way to communicate within itself," he said.
