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Column: In a frenzy of resistance - How the Telegram radicalization works

2021-12-08T16:53:46.106Z


The messenger Telegram repeatedly plays a dangerous role with "lateral thinkers" and corona deniers. Because of its functions, the service is particularly suitable for mass radicalization.


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Telegram Messenger: Private messaging service and private messaging service at the same time

Photo: ALEXANDER NEMENOV / AFP

A man murders his family.

He shoots his three children, ten, eight and four years old.

And his wife.

Eventually he kills himself. The man's suicide note suggests that he had forged his wife's vaccination certificate.

Because the crime was exposed, the couple apparently feared arrest and feared their children might be taken away from them.

This monstrous act may well have been carried out for a variety of reasons. But the investigation shows that the man was close to the "lateral thinking" scene. Assuming the investigations confirm what the authorities have let shine through so far: The radicalization of the "lateral thinker" environment, which was already evident in the gas station murder in Idar-Oberstein, would have reached a new dimension. It is not as if this development comes as a particularly surprise if one could speak of lightning radicalization as early as 2020.

Nevertheless, six deaths in a few weeks is a clear sign, if you take the "lateral thinker" context into account. A torchlight procession in front of the private house of a politician, concrete murder plans against the Saxon Prime Minister, a number of arson attacks against vaccination centers and similar facilities. When asked how these acts are related to the radicalization of "lateral thinkers" and the like, a likely answer is: Telegram. Both the gas station killer and the man who killed his family had Telegram accounts. The second seems to have become a member of the regional branch of a Telegram group in Brandenburg in November. False news about the pandemic, masks and vaccinations are spread there, as are calls for demonstrations, AfD propaganda and resistance slogans. Pretty muchwhat one would expect.

But Telegram is structurally particularly well suited for radicalization of all kinds. The Islamist murderers of IS used the network for themselves very early on. Originally intended more for personal text messages, the social-media functions now predominate. Telegram has become a new category of online platform, a mixture of social network and messenger. This is precisely why the radicalization of previously somewhat middle-class people works so well there: Telegram combines the intimacy and immediacy of messengers with the virality and the news feeling of social networks. Telegram is both a private messaging service and a private messaging service. For a long time, the elusive company, which ostensibly operates from Dubai but is actually Russian, hardly cared about problematic content.It is only recently that calls for violence have been deleted in a more symbolic and homoeopathic manner.

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Messenger founder Pawel Durow: The Telegram billionaire and his dark empireBy Christina Hebel, Max Hoppenstedt and Marcel Rosenbach

Channels and groups at Telegram serve as the starting point for the massive radicalization, which - if they are openly created - can be easily found via the search. You can not only subscribe to them with one click, but above all can also be easily linked to one another. This allows new groups and channels to attract hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a matter of hours. Groups can have up to 200,000 members, and unlike WhatsApp, for example, there is no size limit for channels. At the same time, you can easily jump from group to group using the links, each click then leads deeper into the networking of the communities with one another - the beginning of the so-called rabbit hole effect, with which one can lose oneself in the widely ramified cave construction of social media.

Because the content from other groups and channels can easily be redistributed in separate groups, there is hardly a network that is so well suited to distributing individual content quickly. The number of subscribers is openly visible, as is the number of users who are currently online. This creates a sense of size and synchronicity. When someone writes a message, it is displayed like messengers, the new content is automatically displayed below. This creates the feeling of being connected to the active community in real time.

An essential tool is the dissemination of viral voice messages, which with Telegram has regularly reached relevant levels.

The new, excellently working analysis and consulting institute CeMAS investigated the phenomenon in autumn 2021 and found that mass voice messages on Telegram in conspiratorial ideological and right-wing extremist circles have increased sharply with the pandemic.

Voice messages are very low-threshold because you don't need cumbersome formulations in writing.

Language feels more intimate and emotional, which makes the community more responsive.

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All social and viral functions taken together result in an extremely high degree of mobilization, which is why thousands of people can sometimes be moved to "walks" and demonstrations within a few hours.

Or to buy fake vaccination cards, which are offered en masse there.

It is not uncommon for this to be fraud because, of course, nobody reports to the police that the forged vaccination card was not delivered as promised.

With its technical instruments, Telegram acts like its own universe of resistance against the rest of the world. DER SPIEGEL describes Telegram as a »darknet in your pocket«, one could also say: Telegram is the darknet of the little man. Certain content-related and ideological narratives have established themselves in the Telegram circles of the »lateral thinking« environment. First of all, the close and growing closeness to right-wing extremists is striking. Both neo-Nazi groups and the AfD are often quoted. The legal openness of the more bourgeois-esoteric parts of the movement is based on a simple and dangerous point of view: The "corona dictatorship" is so threatening that one has to be unafraid to alliance with everyone who is fighting against it.Right-wing extremists take advantage of this spectacular naivety and have given the originally complex movement a radical right-wing list.

more on the subject

  • Sascha Lobo - The Debate Podcast: The Pandemic Real-Time Radicalization

  • Living in the Pandemic: How the Flash Radicalization of Corona Deniers WorksA column by Sascha Lobo

Conspiracy theories of all kinds are ubiquitous on social media anyway, but they develop a special energy on Telegram. Because sharing is so easy, there is a real hailstorm of conspiracy content in many channels and groups, which becomes an amalgam of the constantly threatening, almost unmanageable end of the world, as is so often the case with an anti-Semitic primer: Bill Gates poisons us via 5G, concealed vaccine damage including the mass deaths of the vaccinated, George Soros and Angela Merkel lock us in for no reason, Corona either as a fake pandemic or a super-dangerous biological weapon, Rothschild and the globalists, the pharmaceutical mafia and the absolute evil, the ancient, world-ruling families who are working on the apocalypse , and so forth. The sustained maximum threats from all sides trigger permanent excitement,which can become an addiction, but above all has the function of feeling like a victim. The victim pose enables radicalized people to use violence that they understand as resistance and self-defense.

In the case of some channels and groups, it is no longer possible to follow them all closely because of the bombardment with content. And that is exactly what constitutes an essential part of the radicalizing effect of Telegram. Because in this way every thrown catchphrase, every new link, every new, angry-desperate voice message acts as a breathless confirmation of the state of emergency.

Half a dozen subscriptions and group memberships in relevant circles are enough with Telegram to get yourself into a permanent state of alarm and fear. It has been well researched what happens then - emergency situations allow an evolutionary program to run in the body in which rationality and empathy no longer play a major role and age-old survival mechanisms are activated instead: escape and fight reflexes, the reduction of inhibitions and moral considerations, the inclination on the friend-foe scheme and black-and-white thinking. The result is shocking: It is easy to generate a self-reinforcing radicalization against the imagined general threat posed by roughly everyone else - I call this phenomenon

resistance frenzy

, the telegram rampage of the social media age.

It will probably cost many more victims.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-12-08

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