Over the course of the past year or so, there’s been a quiet shift happening in the market of messaging applications. Some neo-nazi and other far-right bigshots that previously regarded Telegram as their territory are being forced to pick up sticks and move to a much less popular app called SimpleX.
The Great Telegram Exodus
Among individuals using applications for secure communication, Telegram has been popular for several years as an appropriate tool for communication by extremists and other individuals who would like to discuss certain topics and share unique information discreetly. Well, it was more like their own personal hideout, where they sent their children to when a storm was coming. However, the popularity of this app was recently threatened when the head of the company Telegram, Pavel Durov, declared a war on piracy and stated that the application would begin to cooperate more actively with law enforcement agencies.
But then, events became complicated again for Telegram. Durov himself was arrested in France for various offenses connected with unlawful content published on the site. This was the last insult for many extremists, who now began to think that their private sanctuary on the Net was not as private as they had once believed.
Enter SimpleX: A Privacy Champion?
Less is more might well be the motto where SimpleX is concerned, this is the new cool kid on the block when it comes to secure messaging. Well, it’s silly, it says that it’s going to give you super privacy and it doesn’t even require things like phone numbers or email addresses to sign up. It’s the house you dreamt of having in your childhood – no one asks for your ID and don’t try to spy around.
It has also attracted some celebrity support in the form of Jack Dorsey the former CEO of Twitter now working for Square. Containing the vision of over $1 million in funding, SimpleX seeks to become a true fortress of user’s privacy. On its website, it says that it cannot track people or even know how many people use its servers.
One of the users writing in the thread cracked a joke suggesting that while using Telegram he was using a combined lock on his account but now that he switched to SimpleX he is using a state of the art vault. That’s why when Telegram was considered as a secretive option it still needed a phone number or an e mail. SimpleX? Nothing!
Why Extremists Love SimpleX
Far right wing miscreants who are ever in search of means to mask their operations have been given a bonanza by SimpleX. The app is reported to have no identifiers, something that security analysts noted makes it difficult for police to catch people, Erondu said. In contrast to it, Telegram has fixed serial numbers of users which can be traced alongside different accounts of a user, making the work of investigators much easier.
To the bigots, SimpleX has end to end encryption and hardly anything is known about the app apart from the names of the two persons using it. As one far-right user put it: “It’s not foolproof, however there is no need to enter your email or phone number.” It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot harder to track than Telegram, and that’s good enough for them.
What does this mean for everyone else
You may be asking yourself right now: So what? Well, this migration is something that worries national security officials. When fanatics switch to less public networks such as the SimpleX platform, their actions become even harder to track. Well it is like playing the game of Whac-a-Mole, where, everytime round a corner is turned they are some where else.
Ultimately, until a few years ago, people went to Ask.fm (do you recall it?) early phases and even Instagram for recruitment and assembly. While trying to eliminate illicit activities, those actors relentlessly look for new spaces in the platform. SimpleX is simply one of many such caches and has been so, at least for plain looking secret bases.
Is SimpleX the New Telegram?
Not exactly. The creator of SimpleX, Evgeny Poberezkin, stated that his application is not developed to compete with Telegram. In fact, using SimpleX you can’t even have those large group chats that Telegram has been popular for. To avoid flooding the platform with extreme content from far and wide, SimpleX has small group sizes.
To the big fans of privacy, SimpleX still has much to attract. But as long as it stays safe, it is only natural to expect more and more far-right — and other private — people to switch to it.
