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Opinions

The Flowering of Telegram and the Moscow Lockdown That Wasn't

October 8, 2020
Ilya Klishin
5 min read
"Ordinary people believe unconfirmed rumours on Telegram more willingly than official reports on state television"
"Ordinary people believe unconfirmed rumours on Telegram more willingly than official reports on state television"

Ilya Klishin is a Russian journalist and media consultant and the former editor-in-chief of TV Rain, Russia's only independent TV station. He has contributed to Russia's most prominent independent press outlets, including Vedomosti, Snob, OpenSpace and others, and to the English-language Moscow Times, and had a central role in anti-electoral fraud campaigns after Russia's December 2011 parliamentary elections. 

In a guest post for IranWire's ongoing series about disinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, Ilya Klishin examines the "truth drought" in Russia that allowed for Telegram channels, including those spreading mistruths themselves, to flourish.

 

One of the most-discussed Russian TV dramas of this season has been a series called “Just Imagine What We Know,” made by a subsidiary of the technology giant Yandex. It features an anonymous Telegram channel: a peculiarly Russian phenomenon that has not only delineated the media and political landscape in recent years, but now also influences public opinion (especially on coronavirus), to the extent that ordinary people believe unconfirmed rumours on Telegram more willingly than the statements of official reports on state television.

 

How did this happen?

 

The trailer for the Yandex-sponsored series included a notable phrase: “Telegram channels have become the last bastion of free speech in Russia.” To understand how Russia got to this point, we have to go back 15 to20 years. At that time, the young and energetic President Vladimir Putin had come to power and a period of change was taking place in Russia that would see its bastions of free speech gradually diminished (in future, they would be eliminated altogether). More and more TV channels, radio stations, newspapers and magazines, and later websites, either came under the direct control of the Kremlin or were purchased by tame oligarchs.

 

During that period, the Russian businessman Pavel Durov created a Russian clone of the social network Facebook (though he would probably prefer the word “analogue”), known as VKontakte. It quickly gained popularity and inevitably Durov was then forced, to put it mildly, to give up his “baby” to people loyal to the government and to leave the country.

 

After that Durov, now abroad, created the Telegram messaging service. On this encrypted app, a proliferation of Telegram channels blossomed that have since become the crown jewel, the pinnacle, of the toxic and sick media landscape of late Putinism (and not at all, as was intended, a fortress of free speech).

 

By now the government had directly or indirectly subordinated more and more media outlets to itself, up to and including social media. It chased the few remaining independent projects into a marginal ghetto and intimidated them with potentially huge fines or lawsuits. As such, relationships between the rulers of Russia and Russian journalists had changed. Journalists were now became servants of the regime: a sub-division staffed by officials. How can a subordinate criticise their boss? How can they ask him unpleasant questions or hold him to account? Let alone publish kompromat (compromising information) about him? The answer is, of course, that they can’t.

 

Traditional work with sources (including anonymous ones) could still be seen in the 2000s in the respectable Russian press. But this has now disappeared, replaced by either “leaks” or “claims”. It means that if a publication – be it Kremlin-controlled or independent – obtains information, it’s always useful to someone: to whit, one or other of the pillars of the Kremlin. Someone is trying to achieve an aim through the media. The benefits of the old-school humanist fight for goodness and truth over evil no longer follow.

 

It was in this paradigm that anonymous Telegram channels began to appear. They germinated among the heavy Kremlin tapestries, behind which the real policies are supposedly being made, and the real fate of Russia is being decided. Behind them is a scheming Byzantine atmosphere, where your allies are forever preparing your stab in the back for you and today’s minister or governor could be in prison tomorrow, where all of the elite apparently stand together, but there aren’t enough succulent morsels for everyone.

 

Telegram created a unique situation in which you could say anything – even complete rubbish – and sound convincing, citing “Kremlin sources”. People believed it anyway, drinking in every word, because they intuitively understood that they couldn’t trust traditional media.

 

As time went on this tool was fully mastered by everyone who wanted to do so – including those in the Kremlin – and, according to rumours, via a third party they created a whole network of anonymous Telegram channels, through which they started quietly influencing public opinion.

 

Besides the Kremlin, anyone who has the urge can set up and run one of these channels. It’s a viable business model. In times when we face a chronic shortage of truth, you instinctively want to believe any passer-by in a mask who tells you: “Just imagine what we know.”

 

For this business to continue working and bringing in revenue, it has to constantly preserve the reputation of a person who has access to government secrets. That’s how the myth that Moscow would be going into lockdown from September 21 was born.

 

This particular piece of viral disinformation was based on one of the possible measures that really was being discussed in the mayor’s office (completely publicly): as the worst-case scenario. The resultant “leaked” documents, supposedly classified as secret, were forwarded from one Russian to the next up and down the country: from waiters and taxi drivers to the CEOs of major companies. Because fear has big eyes, and in present-day Russia, no one believes any more.

 

September 21 came and went, and Moscow wasn’t quarantined – even though the number of infected people was on the increase as the autumn chills set in. On social media, people joke that the sources on these channels deceived them, and they’re leaving. But they keep reading them. Because there’s no one else.

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