How Are Journalists Using Telegram to Report on Russia's War with Ukraine?
When it comes to press freedom, Russia is notoriously brutal. Currently, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranks Russia 150th out of 180 countries: “With draconian laws, website-blocking, Internet cuts and leading news outlets reined in or throttled out of existence, the pressure on independent media has grown steadily since the big anti-government protests in 2011 and 2012.” Russia’s press freedom ranking has fallen steadily since Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny was poisoned, and later arrested upon his arrival back in the country.
Without a guarantee of safety or freedom in reporting, journalists are getting creative. Russia’s war in Ukraine is the biggest act of international aggression since the Second World War, and though Russia’s journalists and Ukraine’s journalists and citizens might not have the tools to report in official newspapers, they have found the web-based app Telegram.
WHY TELEGRAM?
Telegram is one of the more popular communication apps in Russia because Facebook and Twitter are blocked. Telegram offers several tools other messaging apps don’t, including being able to add to a “story,” to archive those “story” posts, and to preserve image metadata. Image metadata preservation means that any image that is archived or otherwise removed from circulation will be saved and accessible to its users; therefore, any posts about the war that are archived because of censorship or some other form of interference will be saved and re-accessible. Telegram also has a chat-export tool, meaning any and all text from the chat can be moved somewhere else. Google translate, for example, can be used to understand and to save the context around the preserved image.
ARCHIVING PHOTOS AND VIDEOS
The archive feature on Telegram will remove any message, image, or video from your inbox and create a back-up copy in your archive. This copy is not subject to moderation by the officials of Telegram, so you are able to keep a copy of anything you would like that shows up on your page. Saving the media fromTelegram is also easy; simply right-click or double-finger click, select “Save As…,” and choose the location to save to. Journalists can also screen-shot these things to have a second copy, in case something happens. You can also send the post’s url to Show Json Bot, which will return the post to you in a text file. There are several ways to archive posts, or even whole channels.
WHAT IMPACT IS THIS HAVING ON RUSSIA AND UKRAINE?
The app is currently being used to document war crimes perpetrated by the Russian government against the Ukrainian people. “What the Army is doing, how many helicopters they destroyed, some news on supplies, shared jokes, local heroes, fallen and still active,” Nataliia Nezhynska of Kharkiv, Eastern Ukraine, said of how she uses the app on a daily basis to communicate. “I think it’s a very useful tool to document war crimes since it has a lot of live footage of bombings from the phones of residents [and] security cameras too.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also used the app to communicate with the world and rally global support for Ukraine. Zelenskyy has used the app since 2019 to garner support for his presidential campaign, to recruit volunteers, and to post exclusive updates from his campaign trail. The campaign found that returning to the structure they’d built during wartime was invaluable.
“I could even say it’s our home turf,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, said to Time. “When the war erupted, we went back to Telegram and remembered everything that we knew, so we are operating quite successfully.” The government has repurposed its COVID-19 channel to provide daily updates about the war to its citizens.
WHAT OTHER ADVANTAGES DOES TELEGRAM GIVE THE UKRAINIAN PEOPLE?
Telegram’s near-instantaneous capability for connection makes it a valuable tool for outpacing Russia’s propaganda. Ukrainian citizens have gone on the app to pre-empt false narratives coming from the Kremlin. Such narratives that have been thwarted with the help of Telegram include the myth that the Ukrainian forces had surrendered or that Zelenskyy had fled Kyiv. The Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, part of its national security council, has embraced this particular use.
The app also removes the boundary of nationalist propaganda as the only point of contact between Ukrainians and Russians. Subscriptions to Telegram in Russia have exploded by 48 percent since February 24th, an increase of eight million people. Though the Kremlin has released its fair share of false-information bots to flood Telegram, the evidence countering the Kremlin’s narrative is frequently available alongside these pieces of clear disinformation.
Though it is imperfect, Telegram provides both Russians and Ukrainians with a pure source of first-hand information. Though like any platform it has serious drawbacks, its ability to keep the people of the world informed on the truth of the war in Ukraine, and even to be used by the state of Ukraine to create a narrative on the war, has helped it to become the ultimate shaping tool in how the public will come to view Russia’s attack on its sovereign neighbor.
