In the Russia-Ukraine information war, encrypted messaging apps provide opportunity and risk

The Russian government is trying to control the narrative around its invasion of Ukraine. One place its messages can either take hold without fact-checking, or get thoroughly debunked and rebutted, is on encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and Meta-owned WhatsApp.

Social media companies like Twitter and Meta have been putting extra measures in place to counter President Putin's propaganda machine. Russia relies on state-affiliated agencies like RT, Sputnik, TASS, and others, to share the Russian government's version of events. Recently, Twitter rolled out warning labels with tweets sharing links from these websites making their Russian state-affiliation known. Meta has blocked the links entirely in Europe. 

But these public channels are just one way that information spreads. In 2021, a New York University study found that Donald Trump tweets flagged by Twitter proliferated on other social networks.

"Tweets spread on other platforms despite having labels on them," Joshua Tucker, an NYU professor who is an expert in both Russian studies and social media and disinformation, said. Public-facing channels where it's possible to moderate content aren't, he said, "the only place people are going to be spreading information."

According to Statista, the most popular messaging app in Russia is WhatsApp. But Tucker, as well as Russian history professor Ian Garner, who has been analyzing the spread of propaganda on Russian social media, say Telegram has been the dominant messaging platform amid the conflict. Telegram is a hybrid platform that has private one-on-one and group chats (that can have as many as 200,000 members), as well as "channels" where the channel owner can broadcast, or that may function as more of a forum.

Messages on WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram are encrypted, meaning not even the platforms themselves can see what users are sending to each other (except in the cases of public Telegram channels). Encryption is great for privacy. But in the past, these platforms have enabled the spread of misinformation. And because platforms are not able to moderate content, countering fake news has required platform functionality changes and dedicated campaigns. 

WhatsApp has rolled out one of these campaigns to counter propaganda or help with general confusion that may be spreading on its platform. The head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart, tweeted Tuesday that Ukraine Emergency Services had launched a helpline meant to provide people with quality information about the situation.

Tweet may have been deleted

While these campaigns are important, it's still hard to even understand — let alone combat — misinformation on encrypted messaging apps.

"It's really difficult to know what's going on on those platforms," Tucker said.

In the past, misinformation has spread on WhatsApp through one-to-one messages and groups (that have a maximum size of 256 members). WhatsApp's "forwarding" functionality and large groups enabled fake news to spread quickly, untethered from an original source. WhatsApp limited the function after it led to real-world consequences in India and Brazil.

But passing the harmful content didn't happen by accident. Kiran Garimella, who studied WhatsApp's role in spreading the misinformation in India that led to mob violence, said that sewing fake news typically requires "bad actors" to build up information networks. While Tucker noted that the West's understanding of Russia prior to the conflict was that it had a "sophisticated propaganda machine," it's not actually known whether Russia has developed these sort of networks on WhatsApp.

Even if that is the case, experts are finding that encrypted messaging — and Telegram in particular — has been serving an incredibly important purpose: Amplifying counter-propaganda, the voices of Russian protesters, and the experiences of Ukrainians.

"Because the government can't install its own moderators, and direct control over censorship of both platforms, we're finding that it's really free space for Russians to be able to discuss anything they'd like about the war," Garner said. "The fact that these discussions are taking place, and taking place quite openly and yet anonymously for individual users, means the government has a problem on its hands."

Garner points to several Russian-language Telegram channels with over a million subscribers that are criticizing the government's assurances that everything is fine in Russia. The Russian government does run Telegram channels for its state-affiliated media, like Sputnik. But of those channels' hundreds of thousands of followers, it's unclear how many are real people, and how many are bots. In the past, Tucker noted, Russia has heavily relied on bots to amplify its messages and increase the apparent popularity of its posts. 

The fact that it's harder to monitor and moderate activity on these platforms doesn't mean they should be ignored. In fact, understanding the flow of information is only going to become more crucial as the information war that accompanies the on-the-ground war ramps up.

"We're into the realm where I think the disinformation is going to be part and parcel with the military strategy," Tucker said. Misinformation will be able to spread at lightning speed, but so, too, will the people on messaging platforms who can fight against it.

"It's going to cut both ways," Tucker said.