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3 July 2023

The World’s Most Important App (For Now)

Charlie Warzel

On Monday, in an 11-minute speech, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, reflected on his brief revolt against the Russian government. It was the capstone to a tense and confusing geopolitical crisis—and it took the form of a voice memo on the popular app Telegram, where it was subject to a form of instant feedback. Reviews have been mixed: 155,600 fire emoji to 131,900 clown emoji.

For close followers of the ongoing conflict in Russia and Ukraine, it’s not unusual to see playful reaction emoji sitting just beneath pictures, videos, and text documenting the horrors of war in real time. Since Russia’s invasion, one of the quickest ways to follow the chaos on the ground has been to download Telegram and wade through live updates from citizens, soldiers, and the government—a digital morass of confusing, contradictory information. Just weeks into the Ukraine war, Time proclaimed that the decade-old app was “the digital battle space,” a moniker that held up over the weekend as onlookers used Telegram to try to suss out whether Russia was heading into civil war.

“The RU/UA war is 99% Telegram,” Aric Toler, an investigative journalist for Bellingcat, which has reported extensively on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, told me this week over direct message. “Prigozhin broadcasted, organized, and orchestrated this all from the platform.” The app and individual channels within it—Prigozhin’s has grown to 1.3 million followers since it launched last November—are effectively feeders for the rest of the internet, according to Toler, who monitors, verifies, and reports on Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels: “Almost every bit of information about the war on Twitter, [Instagram, Facebook, and others] is downstream of Telegram.” Many popular accounts on these social platforms merely repackage what they see on Telegram, often using unreliable programs to translate the channels.

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