> “Telegram channels and websites that don’t belong to our government are the main source of information today as we cannot at all rely on state media,” said Roman Semenov, who follows the NEXTA channels and joined a rally in central Minsk on Wednesday evening. “It’s a Telegram revolution.”
On top of that this is article detailing how this particular technology, has made a significant impact for the protesters.
“The fate of the country has never depended so much on one [piece] of technology,” Viacorka said.
There have been a number of articles and news coverage of this topic. That this one article focused on the technology aspect of the protesters and protesting does not make it, "tech propaganda."
Also Telegram was more-or-less resistant to at least not leak any personal information of their users in ex-USSR. So it's works well enough for protesters threat model.
Signal focuses on secure communication, Telegram has a secure communication feature... But also a social network of group chats and channels that link to each other; and that's the focus of this article.
The other use cases of Telegram could be serviced by other apps. There are plenty of non-E2E social networks available just like Telegram.
EDIT: Unfortunately postmodernbrute I am not able to reply to your comment. But I am not trying to deny that Telegram has caught a wave of popularity among Belarusians and others. What I am saying is that Telegram likely only has that trust because of puff pieces like this. It is not because of any technological superiority or unique feature that it provides (since it isn't/there aren't any).
Technology is only a tool, and is only as good as what people actually do with it. But it can be a crucial tool that changes everything.
Calling it "{arbitrary brand} revolution", when pretty much every messaging platform is indistinguishable feels crass and tacky. The brand isn't the one in the trenches making the sacrifices.
It could be called a smart phone revolution instead. A revolution of the people.
Also, I installed Telegram for the explicit purpose of following the events in Belarus directly from sources. By doing that I noticed that apparently the local press in my country have done the same, as it seemed that most of the updates in online media have come from the same Telegram channels. So, it has also served the role of information dissemination beyond the borders of Belarus at a time when journalists working there were harassed and sometimes imprisoned.
I also read that most of the VPNs wouldn't work, with the exception of psiphon.
You might be thinking of FireChat.
- location based chats, you see people around and can start a local group. So you can easily get in contact with other protestors around you.
- Broadcasting channels
- Not by default, but you can creat encrypted chats, with auto destruction
- Since a few days, encrypted video calls
- Not owned by Facebook
"nine out of ten Egyptians and Tunisians responded to a poll that they used Facebook to organise protests and spread awareness" [1]
"During the Arab Spring the number of users of social networks, especially Facebook, rose dramatically in most Arab countries, particularly in those where political uprising took place, with the exception of Libya, which at the time had low Internet access preventing people from doing so" [1]
As far as I'm aware Facebook is actually owned by Facebook.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
And you have a huge difference between Facebook 2010 and 2020.
Keyword "public". It is the same useful for protests as it was then.
Careful though, since video calls are currently in alpha.
Reportedly, Telegram has kept working when other apps did not.
That makes it a "telegram revolution".
this is the exact same narrative that took place when the Arab Spring happened. What determines the success of revolutions isn't what makes the news media, it's what happens on day 1 after the revolution is over and the cameras are turned off
Same logic would apply if, say, a camera company had tried to brand Selma.
...authorities shut off the internet, leaving Belarusians with almost no access to independent online news outlets or social media and protesters seemingly without a leader. That’s where Telegram — which often remains available despite internet outages, touts the security of messages shared in the app and has been used in other protest movements — came in. Some of its channels helped unconnected, scattered rallies mature into well-coordinated action.
Or these folks can coordinate with protestors in other parts of the world, to raise awareness and stop consumers from buying from a dictatorship.
Usually, the way this problem is overcome is that rioters show up to peaceful protests and engage in a sort of signalling game to other would-be rioters. The usual trigger to begin the riot is the sound of shattering glass. Until someone is ready to throw that first brick, you aren't likely to see much of anything.
Authoritarian countries know all this and they try very hard to prevent riots by banning all peaceful protests. Much harder to start a riot when there aren't any people on the streets to give cover.
- Keyboard warrior? This is a crime in any country including the the US. Can you imagine what it will do to you in a country like China?
>"Or these folks can coordinate with protesters in other parts of the world, to raise awareness and stop consumers from buying from a dictatorship."
- What prevents you from not buying from a dictatorship now? Do you need to be directed by people from Tibet about it?
So, the fact that it happens to be a popular solution for encrypted chat right now doesn't really speak to its necessity for any revolution like you and the article seem to be implying. Easy access to encryption technology in general, sure, but that doesn't specifically need to be Telegram.
This is the rsync v Dropbox of messaging applications.
Yes, unencrypted social features that could just as easily be serviced by any other social networking app which hasn't been explicitly banned yet (and that could happen to Telegram at any time).
> It's that Telegram operates under harsher network conditions.
So their operators claim. But it's not clear why that would be true and I haven't seen any numbers to demonstrate it either. Have you?
Telegram had to survive Russia's attempt to ban it, so it evolved a number of strategies: using push notifications to deliver IP-adresses of not-yet-blocked servers, using socks-proxies, the evolution of the MTProto Proxy encrypted protocol, and finally resorting to steganography to mimic ordinary https traffic, thus evading the DPI.
The attempts of the state censorship agency to block the telegram servers were hilarious to watch: at one point they had 0.5% of the IPv4 address space banned, and broke a lot of stuff (AWS, Google, DigitalOcean, OVH, etc). Telegram was still working, of course.
The IP-address delivery via push notification was a nice idea, if they'd only be on that level with their E2EE deployment.
The adversary in their case is mostly limited to beating up random people and picking on those that take a public stand against the regime.
Turns out it's more important that it works at all and not whether the security is perfect.
Supergroups and channels don't have expectation of privacy. They're not about protecting the content but about spreading sousveillance material, message etc. There only your anonymity matters so you can be safe with burner SIM + burner phone + Tor.
But immediately when you step into realm of confidentiality E2EE matters and Telegram becomes a piece of shit software. No E2EE for groups, desktop clients, or for anything by default. Small dissident groups greatly benefit from E2EE when Belarusian government can't read their conversation by just hacking a single server.
Both are important. Signal isn't about non-private mass-messaging like channels and supergroups so it's not going to offer those. Telegram could be fantastic for channels and supergroups if it used Tor by default and didn't ask for phone number. But it doesn't, and it tries to do too many things while ignoring too many security problems. Turns out that's a recipe to a disaster. See e.g. how CCA tracked Telegram users in Hong Kong, and how Telegram failed to enable the protective measures for users by default.
Then Moscow had a giant demonstration on Red Square and that’s right around the time Putin blinked and started cracking down on such platforms and free speech.
Of course, for those who remember, Telegram was started by Pavel Durov, the “Zuckerberg of Russia” who refused to give out details of VKontakte users, and the mail.ru conglomerate took his company, while he fled to France and started Telegram. Roskomnadzor tried unsuccessfully to ban it in Russia, and inadvertently banned colocated AWS servers hosting LinkedIn etc.
There's a pretty big and well known country that is blaming the election of its president on interference of another country through social media. It seems pretty credible the same social media can have promoted protests in more unstable countries.
As opposed to a general populace pushed to an edge by extreme conditions and leadership which does the exact wrong thing in a circumstance.
* citation needed
This is akin to stealing valor (basically stealing medals and pretending to be the honorable).
This type of valor stealing, is also happening when people call US border detention facilities as 'Nazi concentration camps'. For people whose family members went through a Nazi concentration camp, hearing such a comparing is painful.
For Byelorussians whose livers and kidneys were raptured by the beatings, whose loved ones are imprisoned -- hearing Telegram marketing spin is painful, like when their valor, their sacrifice is stolen.
Yes of course, without recording technology, in my view, we would not have successful type of investigative journalism that project Veritas has delivered.
Or, without cell phones, the ability of people of Belarus to share images of brutality with the world.
Technology, is helping to concentrate the will power of the masses, against well funded machines of system oppressions.
But the will of the people, their sacrifices, their sufferings -- is the driving force -- not Telegram
I was with you until this comment.
What the Jews went through is horrible beyond words.
What immigrant families are going through is also horrible.
They may not be systematically murdered like the Jews being sent to gas chambers, and they may not be sterilized like the Uighurs, but they are still suffering. Families are being separated forever. Lost children will never be given back to their parents. That's not okay.
Don't trivialize human suffering. Condemn it. Don't turn it into an analogy where you can praise those that suffered the most. Who are you to know how any of this feels? We're not trying to win some contest here - the result we're after is the end of suffering.
In fact it is a Telegram revolution, because Telegram is the tool that is allowing this rage to become organized. That doesn't minimize anything about the protesting or the political situation itself. That's not marketing, it's just recognizing the tool.
Your "successful investigative journalism" is more widely recognized as a "right-wing disinformation outfit". O'Keefe and his organization have been repeatedly shown to have fabricated stories, solicited fraudulent activity, and deceptively edited recordings. Their activities are politically motivated propaganda, not journalism.
That's what Lukashenko is using to imprison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siarhei_Tsikhanouski .
Who ran a blog and youtube channel, recording, often without the knowledge of the person he was talking too.
It is the same style of investigative journalism as Project Veritas, O'Keefe are using to show the true colors of the people, actions and ideologies hiding, conveniently, behind a banner of a 'legitimate' political party (who also, unlike Lukashenko, have access to far greater resources, including Wikipedia to 'clean up')
I hoped to get across 3 points with my previous post:
a) what's happening in Belarus is systemic, medieval-style suppression of the populous, voter abuse, and political imprisonments.
And the argument that used by Lukashenko, is the same as @dukswuff is used against Project Veritas...
b) One of the imprisoned leaders, exposed the methods of the tyranny, using the same approach as investigative journalism (involving recordings) as Project Veritas, O'Keefe is doing in US.
Technology is important there, but not more or equal to the heroism of the people doing it. And, at least for me, the more dare the retribution, the more heroic actions are of the journalist.
c) Telegram marketing spin manipulating words, trying to assigning the heroism and suffering of the victims -- to their platform.
Just like some in US are using heroism and suffering of the victims in Nazi concentration camps (who did not choose to go there), equating that to people crossing US border illegally and being detained.
This is stealing of valor.
It is being perpetrated in western media daily for many years, and often spills over to events like Democratic National Convention.
====
I am also going add one more point.
The statements Lukashenko is making about Byelorussian's duty to support him, so not dissimilar to the argument Biden is making about the duty of African-Americans to to support his candidacy.
The marks are that similar.
Tech propaganda at its best.