Telegram’s toxic recommendations | 2024 Year in Hate & Extremism

Telegram is a social media and messaging application that is popular worldwide but was less commonly used in the U.S. until 2019, when extremists adopted it as their go-to social media platform.

Following the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, the 2020 rise of QAnon and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, U.S.-based platforms such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) began to ban, or “deplatform,” users who violated their terms of service by posting hate speech or disinformation. Many of these users turned to Telegram as a replacement. Telegram is free, broadly available across servers and smartphones and has most of the features found on these other platforms, including channels to spread propaganda and chats for small-group messaging. Most importantly for its extremist users, Telegram also has relatively lax content-moderation practices.

2024
Year in Hate & Extremism

A broad variety of extremist groups and individuals, including neo-Nazis, antisemites, conspiracy theorists, Proud Boys, QAnon influencers and others, were operating openly on Telegram in 2024, spreading propaganda, recruiting new adherents and forming communities. On Jan. 13, 2025, the Department of State even designated the Terrorgram Collective, a group of neo-Nazis operating on Telegram, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

QAnon is the umbrella term for a sprawling spiderweb of right-wing internet conspiracy theories with antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ elements that falsely claim the world is run by a secret cabal of pedophiles who worship Satan and are plotting against President Trump. Though some influential individuals are active in the movement, it is not an organized group with defined leadership.

To understand the way these extremists interact on Telegram, the Southern Poverty Law Center Data Lab collected a trove of data from the “similar channels” feature that Telegram launched in late 2023. Telegram calculates the proportion of users of one channel who are also on other channels, recommending these as “similar channels.” By collecting these recommendations for a large number of extremist channels, we were able to uncover the joining patterns that undergird Telegram, including crossover between channels and neighborhoods of channels.

The results of this research were featured in the BBC documentary series Panorama on Dec. 16, 2024.

Since the report came out in December 2024, Telegram has begun restricting which channels offer recommendations. It is unclear what rules or thresholds they are using to make this decision, but some of the extremist channels highlighted in the SPLC’s report are no longer displaying channel recommendations at all.

Illustrations by Jovana Mugoša.