Telegram has a serious doxxing problem

The popularity of Han Nyein Oo's posts on Facebook grew to hundreds of thousands of people in early 2021, making him one of the most influential people in the country. After the country's military seized power, he became a full-blooded supporter of the junta, which has killed more than 1,500 people and arrested thousands more in bloody purges.

He moved to Telegram because he was banned from Facebook for violating its terms. There were messages of support for the military, graphic pictures of murdered civilians, and doctored pornographic images. These were posted in other channels that were run by pro-junta people.

Han Nyein Oo was moving on to direct threats. The anniversary of the coup was supposed to be marked with a silent strike and a stay at home rule. Han Nyein Oo asked his followers to send him pictures of businesses that were going to close. The images and addresses were posted to his followers. Police raided many premises. He claimed credit. He didn't reply to the question.

“That was the start of the doxxing campaign,” says Wai Phyo Myint, a Burmese digital rights activist. “Since then there’s been an escalation.” Advertisement

Over the past eight months, Han Nyein Oo's Telegram channels, as well as those of other pro-coup figures, have harassed hundreds of people that they accuse of siding with the resistance Dozens of people have been killed or arrested in the last year.

After his channel was taken down for violating Telegram's rules on pornography, he started a new one. More than 70,000 people follow it.

Telegram has a doxxing problem. WIRED spoke to activists and experts in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe who said that the platform has ignored their warnings about an epidemic of politically motivated doxxing.

According to a Telegram message, the company has moderated harmful content on its platform. The public parts of the app are monitored by our moderators in order to remove content that violates our terms.

Telegram has a publicly stated philosophy that private communications should be outside the reach of governments. It is popular among people living under authoritarian regimes all over the world.

The service's structure and lack of active moderation made it the perfect tool for the kind of doxxing campaigns occurring inMyanmar.

The structure makes it easy for users to crowd source attacks, posting a target for doxxing and encouraging their followers to dig up or share private information, which they can then broadcast more widely. Misinformation can be moved from anonymous accounts to channels with a lot of users. Cross-posting is simple, so that channels can feed off one another, creating a kind of virality without the use of algorithms. It is suited to this use case.