So, what do you take? Are you worried?
KEVIN Honestly, not really?
Of course, it is not very important for public safety that neo-Nazis, far-right militias and other dangerous groups find ways to communicate and organize, and that these ways increasingly involve end-to-end encryption. We’ve seen this happen for years, and it’s going back to ISIS, and it’s definitely making things harder for law enforcement agencies and terrorism officials.
At the same time, there is a real benefit to getting these extremists off mainstream platforms, where they can find new sympathizers and use the broadcasting mechanics of the platforms to spread their messages to millions of potential extremists.
The way I thought about this is in a kind of epidemiological model. If someone is sick and at risk of infecting others, you want to make it ideal out of the general population and place them in quarantine, even if it means placing them somewhere like a hospital, where there are many other sick people.
This is quite a bad metaphor, but you see what I mean. We know that extremists do not just talk to each other when they are on big, mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They recruit. They join totally unrelated groups and try to sow conspiracy theories there. In some ways, I would rather have 1000 hardened neo-Nazis do bad things in an encrypted chat app than infiltrate 1000 different local Dogspotting groups or whatever.
BRIAN I see where you’re going with this!
When you open Facebook or Twitter, the first thing you see is your timeline, a common feed that includes posts from your friends. But you can also see strangers’ posts if your friends share or like them.
When you open Signal or Telegram, you see a list of conversations you have with individuals or groups of people. To get a message from someone you do not know, that person needs to know your phone number to call you.
To complete our analogy, therefore, Facebook and Twitter are essentially billions of people packed into a huge auditorium. Encrypted messaging programs like Signal and Telegram are like big buildings with millions of people, but each person lives in a private room. People have to knock on each other’s door to send messages, so spreading the wrong information will take more effort. In contrast, a piece of misinformation on Facebook and Twitter can go viral within seconds, because the people in this auditorium can all hear everyone else screaming.