Tag Archives: facebook and elections

The Role of Telegram in the Russia-Ukraine War

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Russian authorities have reacted with unusual fury to the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov by French authorities on August 2024. Telegram is more than a mere social-media app to Moscow. Russian soldiers and spies depend on it for battlefield communications, including the guidance of artillery, the coordination of movements and intelligence gathering. “Many are joking that the arrest of Pavel Durov is essentially the arrest of the chief signals officer of the Russian armed forces,” said Aleksey Rogozin, a Russian parliament adviser and former senior military industry executive.

“As wild as it sounds, the transmission of intelligence, the targeting of artillery, the broadcasting of drone feeds and many other things are currently very frequently done via Telegram,” Rogozin said on Telegram… 

Both the Russian and the Ukrainian militaries started relying on commercial platforms. While the Ukrainians prefer Western providers such as Signal or Discord, the Russians chose Telegram because it is based in the United Arab Emirates, which maintains good relations with Moscow. They think the app is more impervious to Western signals intelligence.

Russian volunteers who supply drones, night-vision scopes, vehicles and other aid to military units operate almost exclusively through Telegram. The service also has offered a lucrative social-media platform to Russian war propagandists, with millions of subscribers, who work in close cooperation with the Russian Ministry of Defense.

“The detention of Durov, by itself, wouldn’t have necessarily caused such a resonance in Russia, except for one circumstance. De facto, it is the main messenger of this war, an alternative to the classified military network,” Andrey Medvedev, a correspondent for Russian state TV and a deputy chair of the Moscow city council, wrote on Telegram…

The Russian government has reacted to Durov’s detention in France with far more outrage and fury than would be expected given the circumstances of the entrepreneur’s departure from Russia in 2014…The director of Russia’s SVR external intelligence service, Sergey Naryshkin, said recently that he expects Durov not to share with French and other Western governments any information that would harm the Russian state. “I very much count on him not to allow it,” the Russian spymaster said in an interview with TASS news agency.

Excerpt from Yaroslav Trofimov, Telegram Arrest Sows Russian War Worries, WSJ, Aug. 31, 2024

Facebook Mobs and Facebook Profits

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A Facebook team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company’s algorithms weren’t bringing people together. They were driving people apart. “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”

That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior?  The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.  Facebook had kicked off an internal effort to understand how its platform shaped user behavior and how the company might address potential harms… 

But in the end, Facebook’s interest was fleeting. Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products…

An idea [proposed by those who wanted to reduce polarization at Facebook] was to tweak recommendation algorithms to suggest a wider range of Facebook groups than people would ordinarily encounter.  Building these features and combating polarization could have come, though, at the cost of lower engagement and it was “antigrowth” [meaning less profits for Facebook].

Excerpt from Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive, WSJ, May 26, 2020