Dozens of neo-Nazis are fleeing Telegram and moving to a relatively unknown secret chat app that has received funding from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
In a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published on Friday morning, researchers found that in the wake of the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and charges against leaders of the so-called Terrorgram Collective, dozens of extremist groups have moved to the app SimpleX Chat in recent weeks over fears that Telegram’s privacy policies expose them to being arrested. The Terrorgram Collective is a neo-Nazi propaganda network that calls for acolytes to target government officials, attack power stations, and murder people of color.
While ISD stopped short of naming SimpleX in its report, the researchers point out that the app promotes itself as “having a different burner email or phone for each contact, and no hassle to manage them.” This is exactly how SimpleX refers to itself on its website.
Last month, one accelerationist group linked to the now defunct neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, with more than 13,000 subscribers on Telegram, began migrating to SimpleX. Administrators of the channel advised subscribers that “while it’s not as smooth as Telegram, it appears to be miles ahead with regard to privacy and security.”
The group now has 1,000 members on SimpleX and, according to ISD, is “part of a wider network built by neo-Nazi accelerationists that consists of nearly 30 channels and group chats,” which includes other well-known accelerationist groups like the Base. Accelerationists seek to speed up the downfall of Western society by triggering a race war in order to rebuild civilization based on their own white Christian values.
The network of groups on SimpleX are also sharing extremist content, including al-Qaeda training manuals, Hamas rocket development guides, neo-Nazi accelerationist handbooks, and militant anarchist literature. And in their newly secure channels on SimpleX, the members of the groups have immediately made direct calls for violence.
“During a 24-hour period on September 25, analysts observed three instances of users calling for the assassination of Vice President Kamala Harris, and one instance calling for the assassination of former President Donald Trump,” the ISD researchers wrote. “Similarly, numerous users called for a race war that would hasten the fall of society, allow them to take the US by force, and institute their desired system of white supremacy.”
SimpleX Chat is an app that was founded by UK-based developer Evgeny Poberezkin. It was initially launched in 2021, and a blog post in August announced that it had passed 100,000 downloads on Google’s Play store. The same blog post announced that Dorsey had led a $1.3 million investment round, having previously praised the app on other social media platforms. Dorsey did not reply to a request for comment.
For years, neo-Nazi groups have flourished on Telegram, many of them under the assumption that Telegram was a fully encrypted platform that provided a greater level of security than it really did. Telegram was used by these groups for building out their networks, sharing propaganda, and planning attacks. However, two of the leaders of the Terrorgram Collective were arrested and charged last month, which was a key factor in triggering the migration to SimpleX, the ISD analysts wrote. The group used Telegram to encourage acts of terrorism in the US and overseas.
