Much of the fear around personal devices being turned into remote controlled explosives is two fold: Could any of our devices and appliances be turned into bombs? What does this mean for international supply chain contamination? Writing about Hezbollah, Kim Ghattas notes that mothers in Lebanon turned off baby monitors out of fear for their childrens’ lives.

To begin with, it’s important to understand why Hezbollah relies on low tech like pagers and landlines. Reuters reported earlier this year that Hezbollah switched to low tech to counter Israel’s sophisticated surveillance tactics. Pagers also run on a different wireless network than mobile phones which makes them more resilient in times of emergency.

The AR-924 pagers that turned into explosive devices on 18 September were believed to have been made by Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese firm. Since the terror attack, Gold Apollo’s CEO has confirmed that it authorized another company, Budapest-based BAC Consulting, to use its brand name for product sales in certain regions. Gold Apollo has denied any links with BAC’s manufacturing operations. In turn, Hungarian authorities have reported that BAC Consulting was only an intermediary, with no manufacturing or production facilities in Hungary. They claim that Hezbollah bought its pager stock from a company registered in Bulgaria, Norta Global. The trail grows ever more complex, with Bulgarian authorities confirming that no customs records prove the existence of such goods being exported through the country. The Japanese company that was initially believed to have manufactured walkie talkies that blew up in the second attack in Lebanon, has also released a statement saying they discontinued making the devices in question ten years ago. 

An Indian man and a Hungarian woman who were part of the companies implicated in the manufactured devices are reported to have gone missing. 
Media coverage has both praised Israel for its tactical genius in targeting Hezbollah and described the attack as an act of terrorism — but it is important to remember that Israel is not the only country to have planted explosives in unexpected places. From the 1960s up until the 2000s, the US and CIA used multiple methods including exploding cigars and seashells in their attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Contaminating supply chains is also an old intelligence tactic, according to Emily Harding, a veteran of the CIA and the U.S. National Security Council, who told Kevin Colliers at NBC that these stories are often kept from the public: “Supply chain compromises are tried and true in intelligence work,” said Harding. “I literally cannot think of a single example that is unclassified.”

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First, let us skim the similarities: Like Zuckerberg and Musk, Durov is a tech-bro with a massive social media and messaging platform that has run into trouble with different governments. Like them, he is insanely wealthy, obsessed with freedom of speech, loves free markets, capitalism and posting hot takes on his favorite app. Durov rarely gives interviews, choosing instead to post updates, vacation photos and thirst traps with meandering captions to his 11 million followers on Telegram. Like many tech-bros, he has a fascination with his own virility and recently claimed to have fathered over a hundred children across the world via his “high quality donor material”. In 2022, he also made paper planes out of 5000 ruble notes (approximately $70 at the time) and Henry Sugar-like, flung them into a crowd of people from his window. 

But unlike the American heroes of Silicon Valley, Durov is a man fashioning his own legend as an international man of mystery. His arrest is a striking example of how a tech billionaire’s monopoly over global information infrastructure gives them–as individuals–incredible geopolitical influence. 

Initial reactions from Russia have framed Durov’s arrest as an instance of Western hypocrisy on free speech. Russians (including voices from within the Russian government) are urging the Kremlin to intervene on his behalf. Access is tricky, but military blogs show deep anxiety as to what his arrest means for the Russian military–which relies on Telegram as one of its primary means of communication in the war with Ukraine.

Durov’s arrest and reactions from Moscow have once again raised a question about his links to the Russian government. The Kremlin’s position continues to be firmly aligned with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (now based in Moscow). who described it as “an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association” and Elon Musk who has compared the arrest to being executed for liking a meme in 2030.

In a rare interview four months before his arrest, Durov described leaving Russia as a young child and moving to Italy with his family. His first experience with free markets, as he described it, convinced him that this was the way to live. His brother Nikolai was already a mathematical prodigy at school, and although Pavel struggled with English at first, his teachers’ dismissive attitude towards him spurred him to becoming the “best student”.

“I realized I liked competition,” he said with a smile.

The Durovs moved back to Russia when Pavel was a teenager, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Pavel’s father, a scholar of ancient Roman literature, had a new job, and the family was able to bring back with them their IBM computer from Italy. Nikolai and Pavel continued to thrive at school—they were now learning six foreign languages each, along with advanced mathematics and chemistry. In his spare time, Pavel was writing code and building websites for his fellow students. It was at this time that he built VKontakte, an early version of social media that soon became the biggest messaging platform across several post Soviet-Union countries. At the time, Vkontakte had a single employee: Pavel Durov himself.

The story of Durov’s run-ins with Russia’s government is better known: in 2011 and again in 2013, the government asked VKontakte to share private data belonging to Russian protestors and Ukrainian citizens. When Durov refused, he was given “two sub-optimal options”: he could either comply, or he could sell his stake in the company, resign and leave the country. He chose the latter. In 2014 Durov sold his shares in the company and left Russia, announcing his departure with an image post of dolphins and an immortal line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

This is also when Durov’s story begins to differ from the smooth narrative turns of American tech broligarchy. Nikolai and Durov created Telegram, a new platform with the ability to host crowds of up to 200,000 people in channels, multi-media messaging, self-destructing texts and the ability to hold secrets. Durov traveled the world looking for a place to set up an office and rejected London, Singapore, Berlin and even San Francisco. “In the EU it was too hard to bring the people I wanted to employ from across the world,” he told Tucker Carlson. “In San Francisco, I drew too much attention.” (The only time Durov has ever been mugged was in San Francisco, he said, when he left Jack Dorsey’s house and phone snatchers attempted to take his phone as he was tweeting about the meeting. Durov says he fought them off and kept his phone.)

“I’d be eating breakfast at 9 am and the FBI would show up,” he said. “It made me realize that perhaps this was not the right place for me.”

Durov became a citizen of the UAE and of France. In 2022, he was named  the wealthiest man in the UAE, His current net worth is 15.5 billion USD.  

In July 2024, Telegram had 950 million active users, placing it just after WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger. Telegram isn’t just one of the most popular messenger apps in Russia and in other post-Soviet countries, as digital freedoms are shrinking, the app’s popularity is growing across the world. The platform began to be used increasingly during COVID lockdowns when disinformation was rife, and platforms like Facebook were allegedly under pressure from governments to censor posts about the pandemic.

Telegram’s popularity has also grown through political crises and protests in Egypt, Iran, Hong Kong, Belarus, Russia and India—Telegram provides a secure means of communication and organization for protesters, but while calls for violence are explicitly forbidden on the app, little else is.

“Telegram is a neutral platform for all voices, because I believe the competition between different ideas can result in progress and a better world for everyone,” Durov told Carlson. But this glib take does little to address the very real concern about child pornography, revenge porn and deepfakes that are able to thrive on the app because of its lack of moderation.

In his telling, competition and freedom are the twin motivations behind all of Durov’s decisions. It’s always one or the other that will explain why he does what he does, whether that’s living in the UAE, resisting content moderation on Telegram, or refusing to invest in real estate and private jets. 

“Millions of people have been signing up and sharing content on Telegram in the last hour while Instagram and Facebook were down,” he posted after a Meta outage in March. “Telegram is more reliable than these services—despite spending several times less on infrastructure per user. We also have about 1000 times (!) fewer full-time employees than Meta, but manage to launch new features and innovate faster. Throughout 2023, Telegram was unavailable for a total of only 9 minutes out of the year’s 525,600 minutes. That’s a 99.9983% uptime!” 

Since his arrest and interrogation, prosecutors have said that the judge in Durov’s case sees grounds to formally investigate the charges against him. Durov has been released from custody, but is banned from leaving France. He  paid a bail of €5 million and must present himself at a police station twice a week. 

Durov’s arrest has also raised questions about whether tech titans can personally be held responsible for what users do on their platforms. In India, Narendra Modi’s government has already said that it will also be investigating Telegram, while the Indian press has been agog with details about Durov’s personal life, fixating on his virility and the blonde woman who has reportedly been missing since Durov’s arrest. Durov’s brother, the once-child prodigy Nikolai is also wanted by French authorities, and a warrant for their arrest was issued as early as March. Durov’s Toncoin has crashed since news of his detention. What remains to be seen is whether Pavel will fall prey to the cult of his own personality or regain that which he claims to value above all else—his freedom.

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Zelenaya Lenta — Russian for “green ribbon” — is one such initiative. Their manifesto is simple. It calls for people to hang green ribbons in public places to signal their opposition to the war. People in more than 200 cities have taken part in the action, and ribbons flutter on crosswalks, handrails and even bathroom stalls, from densely trafficked Moscow neighborhoods to far-flung Siberian villages. “It’s safe when everything else is forbidden,” one organizer involved with the Green Ribbon campaign told Coda Story.

In the early days of the invasion, people tied green ribbons to their backpacks or wore them in their hair. Some posted pictures of the ribbons and other anti-war symbols on social media. At its peak, the campaign saw upwards of 500 photographs of green ribbons daily. But authorities caught on quickly. In March 2022, a lawyer from Chita received a $200 fine for “discrediting the Russian army” because she had a green ribbon tied to her bag. Activist Nikolai Rodkin was fined $400 on the same charge when he laid flowers and green ribbons at a vigil for fallen Ukrainian civilians in Omsk, in southwestern Siberia. 

As the dangers of speaking out against the war have become more and more apparent, the Green Ribbon movement has adapted. Organizers developed a Telegram bot where activists could share photographs of their work anonymously. Today, a group of five people, three of whom have left Russia, coordinate Green Ribbon’s digital presence. They repost submissions to Instagram, TikTok and a public Telegram channel.

Another primary objective of the campaign is to guide people to accurate information about the war, something that is difficult to come by for most Russians today. Activists scrawl hashtags on their green ribbons that lead to the campaign’s social media pages, where followers will find links to independent news outlets and images of the war’s destruction that are nowhere to be seen in Russian state media. One recent Instagram post featured videos of flattened cities in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Another post offered details on the numbers of Russian soldiers injured during the war and plans to deploy hundreds of thousands more to Ukraine.

The campaign has seen steady participation from activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg — the traditional centers of protest in Russia — as well as Ekaterinburg, Kaliningrad and Sochi. Green Ribbon built a map to show how far the movement stretches. While the organizer couldn’t say precisely how many ribbons have been hung, they estimated it was at least 10,000. The organizer asked Coda not to use their name, for fear of reprisal by the state.

Beyond activist circles, do these efforts make a difference? It may be tempting to see the campaign’s geographic spread or follower counts as an indicator of how the Russian public thinks about the war. But the numbers are still relatively low, and the anonymous nature of the campaign makes it difficult to discern how many people are truly engaged. 

“There’s a very strong, unsubstantiated assumption that because the regime is repressive, the majority opposes the war but is just afraid to vocalize,” said Maria Popova, a professor of political science at McGill University. Journalists and researchers in both Russia and the West are skeptical of public polling, which often has low response rates and where social pressures to give certain answers can distort the numbers. And experts warn against taking reports of high support for Putin and the war at face value. 

The campaign can’t resolve the question of public opinion, but it does offer a view into the nature of Russian opposition and its patterns of protest. The organizer was clear that Green Ribbon is not really an organization but a structureless movement. “There’s no management or commands from above,” they said. Maria Sidorkina, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, likened Green Ribbon to the massive anti-regime demonstrations in Bolotnaya Square in 2011 and other leaderless protests that have been around in Russia for many years.

Opposition has been fragmented throughout the war, at times for tactical reasons. Groups like the Feminist Anti-War Collective and the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists are set up in individual cells as a way to limit damage to the broader organization. Working independently can leave anti-war activists feeling isolated. The Green Ribbon organizer said that green ribbons on the street help activists realize they are not alone. “There are a lot of us, and this sense of community has been an important outcome of Green Ribbon,” they said. 

For Popova, the emotional well-being of Russian opposition should not be the end goal of protest movements like Green Ribbon. Popova, who helped to draft the “Statement of concerned Canadian scholars on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” instead emphasized the importance of changing people’s minds. “I’m not judging them by whether they’re making a difference, but whether they’re trying to make a difference,” she said. “The goal should always be to try to reach more people and convince or convert them somehow.”

Media outlets in Kazan, Arkhangelsk and St. Petersburg have covered the appearance of green ribbons in their cities, and journalists with Radio Free Europe’s Siberian service interviewed a woman who hung ribbons all over Ekaterinburg. Even the U.S. Embassy picked up on the protest action and included an image of a green ribbon in an anti-war propaganda video.

Green ribbons have also garnered attention from audiences that are outright hostile. “We receive many threats and photographs of green ribbons that have been torn and burned,” said the organizer. But they see these responses as a sign of the movement’s effectiveness, so long as they can maintain participants’ anonymity. In short, they said, “if they fight us, then we are doing everything right.”

The post Is Russia’s anti-war movement changing people’s minds? appeared first on Coda Story.

But just like at the start of the invasion, physical resistance to mobilization soon began to fade. Russian resistance to the war today is mostly an online operation, and Telegram has become its central platform. With Facebook and Instagram banned under an “extremism” law, and Russian social media giant VK under almost direct control of the Kremlin, Telegram has offered a relatively safe harbor where one can find Russians expressing grief, anger and frustration about the war. But this comes right alongside political narratives and disinformation from across the spectrum and plenty of tall tales from the twisted world of conspiracy theories. It is from these foundations that an organization called the Council of Mothers and Wives has sprung into existence.

The Council launched its Telegram channel on September 29, just days after Putin instituted the partial draft, and now has more than 23,000 followers. Behind it is Olga Tsukanova, a 46-year-old mother who had a brief moment in the limelight when a video she posted on VK went viral. In the video, Tsukanova spoke of how her son was pressured on two separate occasions to sign a contract to be “voluntarily” sent to the front. “I address all Russian mothers,” she said into the camera. “Stop winding snot on your fist and crying into your pillow. Let’s band together.” After her video touched the hearts of mothers across the country, she decided to create the Council.

When I first sat down to read through the channel, I found testimony about conditions on the front and stories of families’ difficult experiences after their loved ones were drafted. In its second post, the Council demanded practical information about the deployment: How much training would draftees receive? What winter clothing would they be issued? How would food be organized? All were reasonable demands, given the news that Russian troops were hugely under-equipped for war. Pictures of supporters across the country, mailing their demands to the authorities, right up to the office of President Putin, followed.

But then another side of the channel began to emerge. Again and again, when I clicked through the links shared, I found myself on the page of another organization, the National Union of the Revival of Russia (OSVR). Established in 2019 to restore “the destroyed state of the USSR,” the OSVR looks longingly at the bygone days of the Soviet Union. It also fosters conspiracy theories on the coronavirus and 5G. According to the OSVR’s manifesto on partial mobilization, which was shared by the Council on Telegram, the war in Ukraine was “started by Chabad adherents” to build a “new Khazaria” on the territory of Russia and Ukraine — an antisemitic conspiracy theory that is grounded in the geography of the medieval Khazar empire and has prospered since the invasion. The OSVR is led by Svetlana Lada-Rus, a conspiracy theorist who believes that a third force is committing atrocities in Ukraine and has claimed that dangerous reptiles from the planet Nibiru would fly to earth and unleash chaos.

The OSVR’s influence on the Council is not an accident. Tsukanova spoke at an OSVR meeting in October and was a member of the now-defunct Volya party that Lada-Rus once led. Tsukanova told a reporter from Novaya Gazeta that the OSVR helped her to create the Council: “A lot of effort is needed for this, without the support of like-minded people, it is difficult to do this. The movement itself supported me.” Both women hail from Samara, a small city near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.

“Internationally there has been a slight misinterpretation, or at least a superficial understanding, of this [Council] movement that is not to be confused with the more long-standing Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia,” Jaroslava Barbieri, a doctoral researcher on Russia at Birmingham University, told me. “If you look at Olga Tsukanova’s social media prior to the announced [partial] mobilization there is not so much talk about the so-called military operation, actually you will find content about conspiracy theories, a rogue government,” she said. “That is a bit more emblematic of a broader political stance of the members of this Council of Mothers and Wives.” 

In addition to promoting OSVR materials, the channel also features a not-so-healthy dose of anti-vax propaganda. Coda Story’s partners at Democracy Reporting International ran an analysis of the channel and found that more anti-vaccination content was reposted in the first week and a half of its existence than content that could be described as clearly anti-war.

This peculiar cocktail of quackery, conspiracy and seemingly genuine grief about the war maintained a steady beat until mid-November, when the Council staged a public demonstration. On November 14 and 15, 2022, members of the group picketed the Western Military District headquarters in St. Petersburg where they demanded the return of mobilized troops from the Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine. Eager to get media attention, the group stressed on their Telegram channel that “no anti-war statements” were made, only a wish to open “dialogue with officials” about “specific shortcomings.” After the event, the Council got some national media coverage, which they hailed as a success. 

Several days later, Putin announced plans to meet with a select group of soldiers’ mothers on the outskirts of Moscow. Handpicked for their association with pro-war NGOs, or for their outright support of the so-called special military operation, these were the women the Kremlin wanted to use to calm fears around mobilization. “This is a sensitive topic for [Putin],” said Maxim Alyukov, a research fellow at the King’s College Russia Institute. “The government perceives this issue of mothers and wives as a more dangerous issue than some kinds of political criticism, because it is something which can resonate with the public, and that’s why [the Kremlin] ran their own council of mothers and wives,” he told me.

For Tsukanova and her followers, the roundtable was a snub. They duly took to social media to air their grievances. “[Putin] wants to declare real mothers and wives extremists and agents. CIA?”, one Telegram post read. International media also took note. The BBC ran clips of Tsukanova saying that the Russian authorities were “absolutely” afraid of women. Democracy Reporting International’s modeling for Coda Story shows that, in the midst of these events, the Council’s Telegram channel saw a significant increase in followers. 

Soon, the Council’s VK page was blocked on orders from the Prosecutor General’s office and a car carrying Tsukanova was stopped in Samara under the pretext of a drug search while the passengers were questioned. But while thousands have been arrested for their anti-war activism, and others subjected to exile, the Council has been able to continue its work weaving concerns about mobilization with the world of conspiracies. Pro-Kremlin media have been quick to point out links to the OSVR, and Russia’s pro-government, anti-cult organizations have also taken pains to call out the Council and accuse them of being provocateurs. The Center for Religious Studies, led by Alexander Dvorkin, also accused the OSVR of being financed by Poland and Ukraine, a common tactic used to undermine anti-war individuals and groups in Russia.

For Jakub Kalensky, a senior analyst at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, criticism from these corners is not surprising. “This might be very beneficial for you [as the Kremlin], if you have an anti-mobilization organization that is headed by questionable characters,” said Kalensky. “You can use their background to discredit the anti-mobilization position as a whole, this is a hypothesis we could work with,” he told me. 

In this landscape, Russia’s anti-war activism has become ever more fragmented. Years of authoritarian rule have hollowed out the country’s civil society and stripped people of the ability to express dissent without serious repercussions. More than 2,300 people have been arrested in anti-war street protests since the partial mobilization was announced. In March 2022, legislation was introduced imposing prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading “fake news” about the so-called special military operation. The war has only made the stakes higher, no matter which side you’re on. 

Motivations for subscribing to Telegram channels undoubtedly vary — from a desire to stop mobilization to an outright anti-war, anti-Putin position. Groups that gain traction are quickly branded as extremist by the authorities. Those that aren’t often attract suspicion as having some nefarious link to the FSB, Russia’s security service. “There has been a history of infiltration of different opposition movements by the FSB either directly by speaking to members of those movements or most probably trying to send different messages to make them less appealing to different audiences,” Kasia Kaczmarska, a lecturer in politics and international relations at Edinburgh University, said. “This can sometimes work via multiple channels which the FSB is capable of organizing.” 

“It's important to highlight these more complex networks and the processes of how certain institutions came about, to not conflate them with genuine anti-war movements,” Barbieri, the Birmingham University doctoral researcher, added. “We also need to start thinking about how these disinformation narratives could also work as a coping mechanism for people so as not to face the reality of how the war in Ukraine began.”

Meanwhile the Council of Mothers and Wives continues to grow. As the full-scale invasion approaches its one-year anniversary, the channel blasts out condemnations of the mobilization alongside the wholesale promotion of conspiracy theories. It’s clear that the channel offers solace for some people, a place to vent their frustrations with a war they didn’t want in their lives. But for its leaders, it may be better understood as a vehicle for bringing an organization on the fringes of society to a new, and much more influential, audience.

This story was produced in partnership with Democracy Reporting International

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In the months leading up to the country’s presidential election in October — in which, in a close runoff, Lula da Silva from the leftist Worker’s Party defeated the right-wing incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro — social networks were flooded with disinformation, calls in Portuguese to “Stop the Steal” and Bolsonaro’s insistence that the elections would be rigged. 

On January 8, a week after Lula began his third term as Brazil’s president, followers of Bolsonaro took the country’s capital by storm. Frustrated right-wing radicals armed with weapons, flags, mobile phones and conspiracy theories occupied and destroyed the three pillars of the federal government in Brasília: the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. They not only left a trail of destruction but also stole documents and hard drives, and destroyed artworks and infrastructure. 

“There was no surprise at all, they [right-wing radicals] followed the extreme-right playbook, step by step. They are just pawns in a bigger game,” said researcher Michele Prado, an independent analyst who studies digital movements and the Brazilian far-right. According to Prado, people who stormed the capital were “domestic terrorists” moved by conspiracy theories that reject liberal democracy and its institutions. The researcher added that the group views violence as a legitimate response to what it wrongly perceives as a fraudulent election. Prado also called attention to how people were proud to take part in the invasion, boasting of their presence on social media and inviting others to join. “It raises their in-group status,” she said. “The more they perform on social media, the higher their ‘score’ before their peers, the more radicalized they become.”

Bolsonaro has always welcomed and incentivized radicalization. His so-called “Office of Hate” — a pro-Bolsonaro online apparatus known for attacking government opponents and journalists — and his supporters have a long record of spreading hate speech, fake news and disinformation online. But since he lost his re-election bid in a highly-anticipated runoff vote, tensions and accusations have taken on a tone of all-out denialism. This narrative has dominated B-38, a pro-Bolsonaro Telegram channel with military roots and more than 60,000 members. On the night Bolsonaro lost the runoff, before the results were even announced, a member of B-38 claimed that the Brazil Supreme Court's vote-counting "algorithm" — no such thing exists — was stealing votes from Bolsonaro and giving them to Lula. An avalanche of baseless rumors about election fraud followed.

Refusing to accept defeat, Bolsonaro supporters blocked roads and camped out in front of the quarters of the Brazilian Armed Forces, calling for a military intervention. All of these efforts were orchestrated online. By the end of November, paid ads on Facebook and Instagram called for a military coup, spreading misinformation and disinformation about the elections. Despite this going against Meta's content policies, Agência Pública, a Brazilian investigative journalism outlet, found that the ads were viewed more than 400,000 times. In December, lawmakers aligned with Bolsonaro began taking to the floor of Brazil’s Congress to call for a military coup and generate online engagement. These calls were broadcast on TV Senado, Brazil’s version of C-SPAN, and were viewed by more than two million people. 

Bolsonaro’s international allies were also quick to respond to his defeat. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former strategist, had warned of a “stolen election” in the lead-up to polling day and promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring across his social media channels. On the day of the invasion of Brasília, Bannon applauded the insurrectionists, calling them “freedom fighters,” even as Bolsonaro himself was keeping a low profile. Bannon’s strategy worked. Some rioters were photographed holding up a banner demanding (in both English and Portuguese) the “source code” of the elections, a reference to the technology behind voting machines that right-wing figures like Bannon and Trump have accused of swinging the election.

Right-wing radicals and their puppeteers baptized the invasion as “Festa da Selma,” or, in English, “Selma’s Party.” The #FestadaSelma hashtag saw plenty of action on Twitter, where users tracked its popularity in southern Brazil and Miami, Florida. According to the Washington Post, Elon Musk recently fired nearly all of the company’s staff in Brazil, except for a few salespeople, leaving the country of 217 million people with virtually no staff dedicated to  moderating content that incites violence in Brazil.  

The term “Festa da Selma” began popping up on social media on January 5. It is a word play on “Festa da Selva,” which is a military war cry: organizers substituted the “v” for an “m,” perhaps in hopes of avoiding detection by Brazilian authorities or even by social media platforms. “A very common practice of [right-wing radicals] is to talk things over through codes, under the radar. They use codenames and words with modified spelling,” said Leonardo Nascimento, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia and a researcher at the Internet Lab, which monitors more than 500 extreme-right Telegram groups. Nascimento explained that on mainstream platforms, far-right individuals are more careful about the content they post and promote because they fear being banned. But the same caution does not apply to  “low-moderation” platforms. The researcher said that Telegram’s architecture, built on groups and the diffusion of messages, makes it a relative safe haven for extremism.

Telegram took on a key role in Brazilian elections in 2021, when Bolsonaro’s more prominent family members created profiles and began to direct traffic from their other social networks to Telegram. “But the platform is just a vessel. The real center of disinformation isn’t Telegram itself, it’s YouTube and YouTube videos that circulate on Telegram,” said Nascimento. And then the safe haven was forced to dissolve, at least in part. In 2022, in anticipation of the highly contested elections ahead, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered the company to shut down select Telegram groups and remove election-related disinformation they had distributed. The aforementioned B-38 group was temporarily suspended shortly thereafter, presumably due to this decision.

The move made Bolsonaro and his supporters turn to other platforms in the far-right online ecosystem such as Gettr, Parler and CloudHub, but also to more ephemeral and privacy-intensive applications like Zello and Signal. Still, according to Nascimento, four days before “Selma’s Party,” Telegram messages were circulating among extreme-right groups advising followers on what to bring to demonstrations, how to behave on arrival and how to withstand tear gas. They also posted information about caravans and buses heading for Brasília. 

“They [rioters] wanted to make it look spontaneous so people would believe [Selma’s Party] was a movement that worked on a certain degree of legitimacy, of popular demand,” said Viktor Chagas, a professor at Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro state who researches online far-right movements. Chagas contends that Brazil’s extreme-right is now in deep dispute over the identity of Bolsonarism. “The Bolsonaro supporters are losing cohesion. We have the ultraliberals, the monarchists, the gun owners, the neo-Pentecostals and other subgroups going from a process of high centralization in the figure of Bolsonaro to a high level of fragmentation with his defeat,” explained Chagas. “We now have a network that is much more dispersed and much more difficult to monitor.”

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Delivering newspapers in Belarus is dangerous work.

Distributors wear hoods to hide their faces and gloves so they won’t leave fingerprints. They work late in the evening, changing their routes to avoid being noticed. Once past the front door of an apartment block, they find a quiet spot to start work. They stuff leaflets into mail boxes, or leave them in piles where residents can easily find them.

If they are seen, distributors are told to hide the newspapers in their coats or bags. If they are caught by police, they claim the leaflets were never theirs to begin with. 

This is the new Belarusian samizdat: clandestine, self-made publications that seek to spread trustworthy information under a government dedicated to keeping it hidden. But unlike Soviet-era samizdat that came before it, Belarus’ new free press is a hybrid, digital-and-print operation. While its delivery is decidedly low-tech, the network of volunteers behind it uses anonymous, decentralized apps to enlarge its reach and minimize individual risk. Distributors take the materials from online publications, but then print out the leaflets at home — ready to be handed to friends, neighbors, and people who rarely use the internet.

In this world, samizdat starts life on Telegram, one of the few platforms where Belarusian oppositionists can connect and gather news. Belarusians flocked to the encrypted messaging and news-sharing app in the summer of 2020, when President Alexander Lukashenko secured a sixth term in office, despite widespread allegations of election fraud and declarations by foreign governments that his win was not legitimate. The country saw the largest protests in its history, and riot police violently subdued demonstrators who opposed the results.

Belarus has since seen a stream of politically-motivated prosecutions, a constant reminder that dissent will not be tolerated. Even the most innocuous events have led to fines or prosecution. One woman was jailed for 18 months for “insulting” photoshopped images of Lukashenko on her phone. Another was fined because her socks were reminiscent of the opposition flag. This has all amounted to a quiet, uneasy national atmosphere, in which Belarusians must constantly second-guess the authorities, and those who support the opposition are afraid to say so publicly.

While Telegram has become the go-to platform for Belarusians seeking out trustworthy news, it is not reaching everyone. Most users are in or near Minsk, the capital.

Enter ByProsvet, Belarus’ samizdat aggregator. This volunteer-driven effort has built a bridge between online and offline worlds, seeking to reach people who otherwise might not have access to reliable news and information. Members of the group live both inside and outside the country, and identify as “citizens of the Republic of Belarus who are not indifferent to the future of our country.” The “By” in their name is shorthand for Belarus, while “Prosvet” in Russian means “clearance” or “light.”

Using a Telegram bot that automatically distributes news and information to the network, ByProsvet invites users to download PDF files, print out physical copies of the newspaper, and then distribute them by hand. Activists can then use another Telegram bot to update an online map, showing readers where they can find the latest print-outs. All of the team’s printed materials include the handles of independent Belarusian news sites operating elsewhere on the internet, inviting readers to seek out more information online. While most of the work happens on a volunteer basis, ByProsvet uses a crowdfunding platform to cover larger expenses.

The leaflets include reports on government repression, often spotlighting cases in the specific areas or towns they serve, and interviews with protestors or Belarusian opposition leaders. Some also share news on broader topics such as the war in Ukraine or the migration crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border, which have been distorted by Belarusian government propaganda. Some articles are written by individual publications, while others are repackaged from other digital media outlets.  

The process provides a somewhat secure separation between those writing and editing each newspaper, and those distributing and reading it. The decentralized system makes it almost impossible for security services to bring down the entire operation, or to arrest larger groups behind it. But it is not fool-proof.

People who are caught with a small quantity of newspapers usually get fined, explains Zhenya, an editor for the samizdat outlet Belarusskiy Vestnik, or “Belarusian Bulletin.”

“The people who work with us are connected to us — they are under our full care. We pay fines, and if necessary, we also pay for people to leave Belarus,” they say.

One volunteer, Arciom Fedasenka, was arrested after printing samizdat at his own private publishing house in May 2021. He was jailed for four years in a maximum-security prison for “participating in group actions in gross violation of public order.” Another, Aleh Haurylau, was arrested for printing and distributing samizdat, and is now in pre-trial detention for “insulting the president.”

Go small, or go dark: Countering the media crackdown in Belarus

“All sources of alternative opinion have been destroyed in Belarus – everything,” says Zhenya.

“Given that far from 100 percent of the population has access to the internet, people simply have no choice. They only have access to one opinion: that of our unrecognized president and his junta. We know what happens when the people have no access to alternative opinions. We’ve seen it with Russia,” they say.

Indeed, as anti-government protests grew larger and more frequent after the 2020 elections, so did state efforts to snuff out the country’s few independent media outlets. In August 2020, one of the country’s biggest outlets, Komsomolskaya Pravda in Belarus published images of demonstrators who had been badly beaten by police. Authorities quickly stripped newsstands of remaining copies of the newspaper, and Belarusian printing houses refused to publish future editions. The outlet’s news site was finally blocked in September 2021, on grounds that it "could produce threats to national security, including through the artificial irritation of tensions and conflicts in society." Prominent news channels on Telegram have been targeted too. In October 2020, Nexta Live, which offered extensive coverage of post-election demonstrations, was declared “extremist” by a Minsk court. Today, most Belarusian opposition media are based abroad. 

Sasha, a ByProsvet volunteer, explains that under Belarusian law, print magazines and newspapers with a circulation of less than 299 copies don’t need to be registered with the state. 

“We decided that we could act within the law by [printing] local newspapers and leaflets,” they say.

“We provide a tool that everyone can use. By printing and distributing newspapers in their own building, a person delivers the news to an average of 72 people,” says Nikola, the co-founder and editor of samizdat publication Chestnaya Gazeta, or “honest newspaper.” Nikola estimates that about 1.7 million copies of Chestnaya Gazeta have been printed since the project launched.

Who is reading the samizdat?

“If someone is capable of critical thought, then they are absolutely in our target audience,” says Zhenya. “We want to reach out to everyone; we want to give people the opportunity to take a critical look at what is happening.” 

Many of those that ByProsvet hopes to reach are elderly or may not be confident using technology in their daily lives. Samizdat publishers believe that many Belarusians are simply more likely to trust the printed word.

“For a huge segment of society, the rule that ‘if it's in the paper, it must be true’ still applies. For that reason, just spreading information via the internet isn’t enough,” says Zhenya.

While harnessing offline publication helps activists reach digitally-isolated Belarusians, it also allows the ByProsvet team to tackle digital-only problems. Their leaflets don’t just reach Belarusians who live in a completely offline world. They also reach ordinary people who may only visit a select number of government-controlled news sites, or those who tend to only hear the opinions of friends and family that echo their own.

The decentralized nature of the project also allows distributors to make their own decisions on where and how to share information, rather than putting them at the mercy of algorithms or major platforms. Instead, they can use their local knowledge to reach out within their communities and distribute leaflets where they think people will actually read them. 

Sasha believes that all of this is key to cultivating the long-term resistance that Belarusian activists hope to nurture. They see the samizdat as a way to carry the protest movement forward, even when it has left the streets.

“Now, when there are no active changes [happening in Belarusian civil society], newspapers, leaflets or stickers are motivation for people who support the opposition and a reminder that there are still others out there with the same values,” says Sasha. “They are a reminder that … Belarus’ current stagnation is not forever.”

Zhenya agrees. “[The people distributing and printing samizdat] have not given up … despite the terror unleashed by the self-proclaimed government against the people of Belarus,” she says. “They believe in victory and continue to fight.”

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But on March 26, Domozhifoff was blocked. He wasn’t surprised. 

“This is another bad sign in a series of bad signs,” he said. 

Online censorship in Russia is escalating at breakneck speed. Russia has clamped down on access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram since the country invaded Ukraine Feb. 24. This has narrowed online social media choices to homegrown options like VKontakte, also called VK. With a dominant position in Russia –80% of Russians online use VK– the winnowing of competitive options is an opportunity for VK, but as Domozhiroff discovered, domestic platforms have moved quickly to squelch any criticism of Kremlin policy.  

The latest expulsions of foreign social media occurred suddenly, but for years the Russian government had been diminishing the role of platforms like YouTube and Facebook, where media-savvy political opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny encouraged dissent and promoted protests. 

The Kremlin’s dedication to establish a sovereign internet, which would allow authorities to monitor and censor online traffic in and out of the country, vacillated and was sometimes tepid. LinkedIn was banned from the country in 2017, but that platform had only 6 million Russian users at the time. In 2017, the Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor threatened to block Facebook unless the company complied with a law requiring the storing of Russian personal data on servers physically located in the country. But when Facebook refused to comply, it was hit with a miniscule $53,000 fine. Roskomnadzor also went after Twitter last year by slowing down access to it in Russia. 

The Kremlin’s bid to control social media is no longer indecisive. Since February 24, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube were blocked in rapid succession. Roskomnadzor classified Meta, the corporation that owns Facebook and Instagram, an extremist organization. Meanwhile, the last of Russian independent media,TV-Rain and Ekho Moskvy radio, liquidated their operations in Russia, and access to foreign media like the BBC was restricted. 

The Kremlin’s hope was that by blocking foreign social media, “people would turn to local options which are easier to police and control,” said Tanya Lokot, an associate professor in Digital Media and Society at Dublin City University.

To some extent, it worked. From February 24 to March 15, VKontakte, used by over 50 million people, saw an increase of 4 million users.

The U.S. has sanctioned VK, which was bought by a company that is partly owned by the state and partly owned by a close associate of Putin. 

VK “is a digital playground for whoever controls the company,” said Lukas Andriukaitis, associate director of DFRLab, a disinformation think tank. 

As with the banning of foreign social media sites, the invasion of Ukraine has accelerated a crackdown on speech occurring on domestic social media that run counter to the Kremlin’s approved narratives. “VK censorship is escalating,” warned Lokot. 

On March 10, the VK blocked the pages of Voice of America’s Russian service, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian service, and Current Time, a 24-hour Russian-language television and digital news network. On March 22, Navalny, who is imprisoned, and opposition politician Ilya Yashin’s pages were blocked for VKontakte users in Russia because of anti-war messages. 

The logic behind which pages get blocked has been unclear. “We do not have extensive knowledge on how exactly VK censorship works. It is pretty much a wild wild west out there,” said Andriukaitis. Certainly, posts about the war in Ukraine are especially risky, and using banned language to describe the conflict, such as “war,” is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. 

With accurate news on VK about the war nonexistent, Russians are turning to VPNs to access blocked social media and news sites. A VPN or “virtual private network” is a digital tool that masks your online activity, so that it can’t be tracked or blocked at the local level. Russians have used the services to continue to access some foreign social media. Instagram, the most popular Western platform in Russia, still had on March 24 around 34 million daily users, only a 16% decrease since it was blocked the day before. 

But in most of the country, the severing of foreign social media has been effective. “Even though those tech-savvy urban dwellers will most likely be able to bypass the restrictions using VPN, they are not the majority of Russia,” said Andriukaitis.

In the past, the Kremlin has been able to prevent Russians from accessing VPNs. It had successfully banned six popular VPNs, and regulated others.

That still leaves Telegram. The messaging platform played an important role for both dissenters and government-affiliated actors in the 2021 civil strife in Myanmar and during protests against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus in 2020. Telegram has been a pivotal channel in Russia too, where the number of users increased by 46% between February 24 and March 15. It remains one of the last independent news sources. Groups fearful of getting shut out of VKontakte are posting in Telegram channels.

Telegram’s position, however, is tenuous. Roskomnadzor tried to block the platform in 2018, only to lift the ban two years later. Rashid Gabdulhakov at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands warns that Telegram faces a grim future.

“The most important question, of course, is what will happen once everyone moves their activities to Telegram? Will the state deem it extremist also or will it use the opportunity to spy on everyone?” said Gabdulhakov.

Domozhiroff, the local opposition politician, is not optimistic. “I think that unblocking and resuming full-fledged work is possible only after a radical regime change and the restoration of Russia's democratic path of development,” he said.

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The Netherlands-based news organization’s reporting stood out not only because of its findings, but also because of the methods the journalists used to unearth new evidence related to the August 2020 attack. Bellingcat specializes in open-source data gathering, and much of the personal information identifying the Russian intelligence operatives was purchased via bots on the popular messaging app Telegram. Since the investigation was published, the Russian government has made numerous attempts to block access to dozens of similar tools. It is also trying to make their usage illegal on privacy grounds. 

Christo Grozev is Bellingcat’s lead Russia investigator, focusing on security threats and the weaponization of information. His investigations include the 2018 Salisbury poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, for which he won the European Press Prize.

We talked about how the Russian government’s crackdown on Telegram is limiting the work of investigative reporters.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity

Coda Story: For those who are not familiar with the method of buying data online, can you briefly explain why it’s so crucial for investigative journalists?

Christo Grozev: In Russia and other former Soviet countries, there has been a lot of leaked personal data over the years. It Is consolidated in different databases, which contain millions of personal records. 

There is a thriving market of Telegram bots that provide access to a large collection of these databases. So, people are making a business out of providing access to anybody who wants to buy a subscription. For a couple of euros a month, you can check a person's phone number or a person's car registration number and get information from all the different leaked databases. 

You can also contact a data trader on a Telegram channel, who offers information from current police databases. For anywhere between 10 and 100 euros, depending on what you're after, you can get somebody's passport records, which also includes a photograph. On the most expensive end, you might be able to get the list of passengers on a particular flight, or even the metadata from phone records. 

Can you give some more examples?

A colleague from a German newspaper asked us to find a Russian phone number that had appeared in some strange transactions involving sensitive military equipment in Germany. I looked up that number in one of the Telegram bots, it gave me the name of the owner, the passport number and the personal tax number of the person. Then, by using another bot that has access to the public state database of companies, I found that person was the chairman of the association of former Security Officials of Russia. 

You can use the same method to find the license plate of a vehicle. Then, you can use another bot to find out the parking fees paid for that car and also the traffic fines. Then, you can try to recreate its route.

One of the investigations you conducted at Bellingcat revealed the names of the FSB agents who are believed to have poisoned Navalny. Many say that got the Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor interested in Telegram and the bots that journalists use. Since then, there have been several attempts to block them and to make their use illegal. Does that impact your work?

I definitely can confirm that, since the Navalny investigation, we have seen a huge crackdown, not only on Telegram bots, but also on the data traders. There have been, I would say, more than 10 closures of bots in the past six months. Yes, there will be attacks, but I cannot imagine how this industry, which is based on previously leaked data, can ever be silenced, because it's all out there.

If buying data through Telegram becomes impossible, what will you do? How much will that limit the scope of your investigations?

Even now, our scope is limited, compared to what we had before. It's partly self-imposed, because of what the government has done to some of the data traders. We've seen them being arrested illegally, kidnapped, tortured and then forced to confess that they cooperated with us, even when they had no idea to whom they were selling data. This is a very high moral burden for us. 

This is only one way that the Russian government seeks to limit the use of technology and access to information. Others include blocking VPNs, suing YouTube and Twitter, and arresting journalists. In the lead-up to September’s elections, will there be an escalation? 

I do expect significant new limitations of online freedoms in Russia in the months before the elections. In fact, we've received tip-offs from members of law enforcement, telling us to expect more and more censorship, including the closure of online media. The Russian government understands that it can only carry on by inconveniencing society, because a large part of it understands what's happening. 

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“We give all groups a voice," Police For Freedom spokesperson Sonia Vescovacci told me recently. Vescovacci, a 42-year-old national police officer currently on leave, first got involved with Police for Freedom after creating a YouTube channel focused on the government’s use of law enforcement to manage the country’s coronavirus response. She says that she does not trust politicians or parties and, when asked about her ties to Lión, stated that he is not part of Police for Freedom and attended the protest at her request, in order to video it.

Newspaper and television reports have characterized protesters like Vescovacci as “negacionista” (denialists), but she insists that she “denies nothing”. Instead, she says, the idea behind Police for Freedom is to hold to account a government that is "leading the country to ruin.”

“A lot of people are suffering, and they are using the police precisely to that end. We do not agree with this,” she said.

New research shows that Covid-19 skepticism in Spain has been fueled by misleading and false stories, spread online by an eclectic mix of rightwing sympathizers, anti-establishment activists and conspiracy theorists. It can also be traced back to a complex web of sources, spanning Latin American media outlets, Russian disinformation networks and Chinese dissidents. 

Throughout the coronavirus crisis, Europe has become a key battleground for such actors. Faced with a torrent of fake news and misleading information, major social media platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube — have attempted to shut down Covid-19-denialist content and accounts. But as in Germany, which has seen the world’s largest anti-lockdown protests, and other countries, these efforts have driven Spanish coronavirus skeptics to the less easily tracked and moderated environment of Telegram. 

The messaging app and social network, which boasts half a billion users worldwide, was already relatively popular in Spain. During the pandemic, it has become a haven for coronavirus denialism. Over the past six months, myself and Laura Aragó from the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia analyzed 60 channels and groups on Spanish Telegram, all of which have grown rapidly over the past year — some reaching hundreds of thousands of followers. 

The Madrid demonstration was one of several that followed the Spanish government’s announcement of a strict curfew at the end of October, part of the nation’s measures to control the spread of the coronavirus. Some turned violent, with police pointing to infiltration by extreme-right groups. In the aftermath of an October 2020 protest-turned-riot in central Barcelona, Mayor Ada Colau condemned graffiti including the words “Fuck Jewish” and “Stop Plandemia”, alongside a crossed-out Star of David. 

The surge of demonstrations coincided with plummeting public confidence in official pandemic narratives. According to a poll by Ipsos, Spain’s declining willingness to vaccinate – down from 72% in August 2020 to 64% in October – corresponds with a similar trend observed in the world’s main democracies. Another survey commissioned by Spanish newspaper El Pais in November found that nearly 65% of respondents believed that Covid-19 was created in a laboratory, while more than 40% believed that there is a conspiracy behind the vaccines. One in five said they would get vaccinated only if strictly necessary, while 13% said they would never do so. 

Disinformation super spreaders

So, who is behind the misinformation fueling this widespread rejection of accepted science? One of Spain’s most popular Covid-skeptic Telegram channels is Noticias Rafapal, run by Rafael Palacios. “Telegram has been the salvation of free people,” he told us via email, adding that other platforms have “prohibited debate” on the pandemic. 

Palacios, a middle-aged man with a background in media and communications, said that his previous work experience has taught him that mainstream news outlets are all beholden to the “economic powers that govern Planet Earth.”

With 126,000 subscribers, Noticias Rafapal has been one of the biggest spreaders of Russia-linked coronavirus misinformation on Spanish Telegram. But it is not alone. Many channels have shared content from Russian-backed Spanish-language media, including RT en Espanol, Sputnik Mundo, and other Spanish-language editions of outlets that the U.S. State Department has identified as Russian proxies, including Global Research, South Front and News Front. 

The volume of Spanish-language content produced by Russia-linked media is massive. The Spanish social media accounts of RT and Sputnik have a combined following of more than 26 million — substantially more than their English-language counterparts, at around 19 million — and even their Russian ones. EUvsDisinfo, a European Union project tracking disinformation, also found that Spanish content attracted more interactions and engagement than that in other languages, especially if it was related to Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. 

Near the start of the pandemic, Russia-linked outlets were involved in suspicious activity on Facebook. In April 2020, Facebook took down pages and accounts affiliated to News Front. Analyzing the pages and accounts that were removed, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab found that News Front’s Spanish-language pages heavily amplified content from RT, Sputnik and state-controlled outlets such as TASS and RIA Novosti. 

According to both the State Department and EUvsDisinfo, Latin American audiences form the main target of Russian-linked Spanish-language disinformation. In the spring of 2020, Spanish editions of Russia-linked media spread conspiracy theories that NATO was using the coronavirus as part of a new anti-China strategy and pushed the idea that U.S. labs were behind the Covid-19 outbreak.

By the tail end of 2020, those outlets were focusing on the promotion of Sputnik V. With content explicitly trained on Latin American audiences, they continually trumpeted the success of the Russian vaccine and undermined those developed elsewhere at a time when countries in the region were procuring shipments. Questions about Sputnik V’s efficacy were also rubbished. Since then, a number of Latin American countries have asked for the Russian vaccine, including Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela, even though the majority of Russians remain reluctant to take it.

One — possibly unplanned — consequence of the blizzard of disinformation targeting Latin America is its potentially deadly leakage to Spain itself. Our research did not reveal how much content intended for Latin America reaches Spain, but since January, vaccinations have been by far the most popular topic on Spanish Telegram’s Covid-19-skeptic channels and groups, perfectly coinciding with the shift in focus of Russian media outlets. 

One RT en Espanol article posted on Noticias Rafapal in March stated that AstraZeneca might have used outdated data for its vaccine studies. The piece attracted nearly 93,000 views on the channel alone. Another RT story, quoting a former World Bank employee and linking vaccination drives to a shadowy plan for population control, racked up more than 100,000 views. 

Countless similar stories from Russian media have been shared within Spain’s Covid-skeptic Telegram channels and groups, not to mention on other social media platforms. But, while content from state actors like Russia plays a significant role in Spain, it is just part of a much broader disinformation ecosystem.

The watchman

Marcelino Madrigal has closely tracked disinformation related to the pandemic. For many years, he worked for a Spanish IT and defense systems company. Colleagues nicknamed him “The Guru,” owing to his formidable analytical skills. After he was laid off, shortly before the coronavirus began to wreak havoc on the world, he began to monitor the spread of false information about the disease on social media.  

Speaking via video call while chain-smoking at his desk, 56-year-old Madrigal described the three main types of homegrown disinformation actors operating in Spain. First comes the alternative medicine lobby, pushing unproven natural remedies for the virus. Close behind it are personalized Telegram channels like that of Rafael Palacios. “And last but not least, we have a group driven by a pre-existing ideology — the far-right,” he explained. “We’re largely talking about the non-parliamentary extreme right here. But if we look for the nearest relations to their Covid denialism in parliament, it’s clearly Vox.”  

In Madrid’s community elections in May, Vox’s candidate for the region, Rocío Monasterio, repeatedly rejected the need for pandemic restrictions, arguing that pretty much all of the government’s measures since the start of the outbreak were unnecessary. 

Vox has increasingly made use of Telegram to connect with supporters during the crisis. In early April 2020, the party’s Twitter account urged followers to download the app to “defend a Spain without censorship,” sharing a link to the party’s official channel. At the time, WhatsApp had just announced a change limiting the mass-forwarding of messages, a feature the party had previously made extensive use of. 

As the pandemic has worn on, Vox — aggressively anti-migrant, anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ+, and now Spain’s third-largest party – has morphed into a decidedly Covid-19-skeptic outfit. In the El Pais survey, its supporters were by far the most opposed to being vaccinated. Nearly a quarter said that they flatly refused to do so. 

In the Madrid elections, Vox pulled the mainstream conservative Partido Popular further to the right, leading it to adopt skepticism about Covid-19 restrictions and to portray the vote as one between “freedom” and the alleged “communism” of left-wing parties. On winning a majority of seats in the region, Vox and the PP have formed a coalition in the Spanish capital.

As Madrigal notes, however, extreme views in Spain’s Covid-19-skeptic movement go far beyond Vox’s campaign against restrictions in the name of civil liberties. Elsewhere, recurring narratives about a supposed plan to enslave the world’s population are common, as are racist conspiracy theories and even Nazi apologism. Content related to QAnon — the extreme worldview which, among other conspiracy theories, promotes the narrative that a Satanic pedophile elite is trafficking children in concert with the global deep state — has also grown rapidly. 

Despite Madrigal distinguishing them as “personalized accounts,” several larger Telegram channels, including Noticias Rafapal, often publish posts about Vox and content associated with the far right. However, Palacios believes that the party does not go far enough with its contrarian stance regarding Covid-19. 

“Vox's position has been very tepid, both with lockdowns, and when questioning the official figures of the alleged pandemic,” he said. “They have disappointed me enormously and have shown that, ultimately, they also answer to globalist economic power.”

In fact, for the most zealous coronavirus skeptics, almost no one goes far enough — including Russian media outlets. Although Palacios continues to post links from RT, Sputnik and other sources, he believes they have also become part of the problem. “It’s been a while since I stopped trusting Russia Today, because it follows the globalist discourse,” he said. Instead, he has turned to another source of news: Chinese groups and individuals with axes to grind against the country’s leadership. 

Dissident views

A week before El Pais published the survey that found two-thirds of Spaniards believed Covid-19 was created in a laboratory, three million people watched a prime-time interview during which a guest claimed just that. 

Broadcast on the popular and often sensationalist TV channel Telecinco, a Chinese virologist named Dr. Li-Meng Yan told Iker Jimenez, one of Spain’s most famous television hosts, about her research. It allegedly proved that the novel coronavirus was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory. Her interview was picked up by major media outlets across Spain. 

Dr. Yan was essentially discovered by Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, and a Chinese billionaire living in the U.S., named Guo Wengui. After hearing of her unfounded assertions, Bannon and Wengui put Dr. Yan on a plane from Hong Kong to the U.S., found her accommodation, and then secured appearances on shows hosted by popular conservative presenters, including Tucker Carlson of Fox News. Her ideas spread around the world rapidly and she was soon turning up in Europe too.

Like many western countries, Spain has become a target of anti-China voices aligned to the U.S. far-right and Chinese dissident groups like Falun Gong, a religious movement that alleges that it is persecuted by the Communist Party of China. 

By far the most shared outlet in Spain’s Covid-19-skeptic channels and groups is the website Tierra Pura. Stating that it reports on aspects of the coronavirus previously undisclosed “due to the manipulation of the communist regime” in China, Tierra Pura publishes a constant stream of misleading and false information about Covid-19. It is also another striking example of disinformation aimed at Latin America filtering into Spain, having first launched in Argentina in March 2020.

Raquel Miguel, an investigator for the independent non-governmental organization EU DisinfoLab, found that Tierra Pura is not only closely tied to Falun Gong itself, but also to the Falun Gong-linked Epoch Times, a sprawling global media organization that has become a key spreader of coronavirus disinformation and pro-Trump propaganda. 

“They have denied the links,” Miguel said. “People should make their own conclusions, but for us it is very difficult to deny.” 

Like other popular Telegram channels, Noticias Rafapal frequently shares links to articles from the Epoch Times and Tierra Pura. “Given that China is a communist dictatorship, its information is obviously not trustworthy,” Palacios said. “Whoever opposes communism is on the side of freedom and justice.”

The result of this global struggle between different hostile actors pushing Covid-19 disinformation is that many people don’t know what to believe. Vescovacci, who started out from the relatively moderate position of questioning her government’s response to the coronavirus, is a case in point. 

When I spoke to her, she began by telling me that Covid-19 is not as serious as the authorities say. “I don't believe in the official narrative, because basically I don't see people dying in the streets,” she said. “They haven't told us the whole truth, and they are using the media chiefly to put fear in people, and to control the people through that fear.” 

She added that she has spent the past year wearing a mask only when doing so has been strictly imposed upon her: “And I haven't died, neither myself nor my children, nor my family.” 

But Vescovacci’s search for the truth about Covid-19 has, like so many others, led her to anything but. Instead, she has ended up giving time to increasingly extreme ideas about the pandemic — ones that deeply compromise efforts to get the virus in check and her own view of the world. “At this point, I’ll believe anything,” she said.

Additional reporting and research by Laura Aragó

This investigation was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund.

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Instead of getting vaccinated, some Russians are turning to the messaging app Telegram where they can purchase a counterfeit vaccine certificate for about $25. Anonymous sellers on the app promise their fake documents will allow Russians to board international flights and side-step mandatory vaccination for students or medical workers, and other professionals.

Telegram channels informally operate as online supermalls for black market products. From synthetic drugs to personal data lifted from Facebook, Telegram users deploy the app’s bot service to make illegal and untraceable sales. Russian users particularly excel with dozens of channels now offering not just fake Sputnik V vaccination documents but also counterfeit antibody and Covid-19 test results, or a doctor’s note excusing a patient from vaccination.

Channels viewed by Coda Story showed messages from administrators warning users they could be punished for refusing to be vaccinated. “Rumor has it that the vaccine will soon become mandatory, and a refusal will get you punished with termination at work, up to an administrative or even capital offense,” warned one admin on the channel “Vaccination.No.” The channel sells three separate types of documents and shares enthusiastic reviews from satisfied customers. 

“You’re the best,” said one beaming customer in a selfie video posted to the channel. “Soon we’re flying out for our vacation!”

Telegram did not respond to a request for comment about the illegal sales on its platform.

Why it matters: The demand for fake vaccination certificates shows how deep distrust runs for the vaccine which is administered in two shots. The irony is the heavy-handed propaganda that accompanied the rollout of Sputnik V may have backfired and actually fueled distrust of the shot. Unlike the U.S. or most of Europe where rollout prioritizes the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, getting a Sputnik shot has been accessible for anyone in Russia since January. Across Moscow, inoculation centers are pitched up across shopping malls and food courts.

However, the current vaccination rate — just 3.5% for at least one shot — lags far behind countries who began vaccinating months after Russia: 18% in the U.S. and over 33% in the U.K. Although some Russian regions have yet to receive the vaccine due to winter conditions or supply limits, the government has set an ambitious goal of vaccinating 60% of the population by the summer.

“There is no shortage of vaccines, but one cannot say that there is a rush,” admitted Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov during a recent press briefing.

One Russian who has yet to get vaccinated is President Vladimir Putin, who while extolling the efficacy of Sputnik V says he’ll hold off until late summer or early fall before getting a shot.

The big picture: Even abroad, Sputnik V is a bigger hit than on its home turf. In Europe, Hungary and Slovakia have both approved the vaccine for use ahead of a decision from the European Union, joining more than 40 countries around the world to sign on to Sputnik. The British medical journal The Lancet recently published a peer-reviewed study showing that Sputnik is 91.6% effective and has no severe side effects.

But with over four million cases of coronavirus recorded in Russia — ranking fourth in the world — Sputnik V pitch is failing to land at home.

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Minsk’s central district court ruled on October 20 that both Nexta’s channel and its logo are “extremist,” ordering the information ministry to restrict access to its content on the Belarusian internet.

The decision to act against the Telegram channel is unprecedented even for Belarus, where authorities have at times shut down the country’s internet to prevent people organizing protests and blocked access to independent online media sites. The channel is effectively the country’s main news source about the protests, with nearly two million people subscribed, a staggering number for a country of about nine and half million. The channel has lost about 10,000 subscribers since the court case was announced.

Coda has previously reported on the crucial role of Telegram channels sidestepping censorship from Belarusian authorities. Legal experts say they do not know how this ruling will affect subscribers or how the Nexta team operates in neighboring Poland.

“I want to understand whether we all need to delete this channel from our smartphones now, whether we can still repost content from the channel, and what we need to do next if we’ve previously reposted content from the channel,” Siarhej Zikratski, a lawyer based in Minsk, told Euroradio.

Tatiana Ravinskaya, a lawyer who spoke to EuroRadio, said that in the past the state has not prosecuted people for simply viewing material which is deemed extremist by authorities: “The law does not hold people liable if they view a link that is published in the country’s list of extremist material.”

A number of channels on Telegram have been targeted by authorities this year, with over a dozen administrators jailed. As the largest channel in the country, Nexta was an obvious target, especially as weekly nationwide protests have continued more than two months after the vote.

“Nexta is not just an important channel, it is the number one channel in the country that is organizing the protests themselves,” said Barys Hartetsky, deputy head of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, in a phone interview back in August when post-election protests began.

Nexta-Live announced in a statement that they are now working on a new name and logo for their channel.

Additional reporting provided by Euroradio, our partner in Belarus. Euroradio, as with scores of online news outlets, has been blocked in Belarus since election day on August 9.

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A day after the largest nationwide protests in the country's modern history, Lukashenko had helicoptered into the factory on Monday to secure support among a constituency long considered to be his base, but instead a scripted speech had been overwhelmed with chants of "resign."

Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm boss, approached the worker who had heckled him. Trying to control his rage, but his voice rising nonetheless, he exploded when he saw the person standing before him holding up a mobile phone. 

"Put down your phone!" he demanded.  

His concern was understandable. 

A week after he had officially been declared victorious in the August 9 presidential elections with a wildly improbable 80% of the vote, the country he had ruled for 26 years was convulsing in large scale protests, horrific riot police violence and factory worker strikes, all being broadcast and organized on Telegram, a telephone messaging app. 

"No question, it's a life necessity now for everyone in Belarus, because it's the only place where we can get authentic information," said Yevgeni Shabanov, a sales manager, who now regularly participates in protests and has sent videos of clashes with riot police to some of the most popular Telegram channels. 

“In some small app, in some little channel suddenly two million people appeared,” said Barys Haretski, deputy head of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, in a telephone interview. Haretski was  speaking about Nexta, the country’s most widely-read Telegram channel. Now with 2.2 million followers, its audience has more than quadrupled since election day. 

However, Nexta is just one of dozens of channels on which activists are organizing demonstrations and publishing news that their fellow Belarusians cannot access elsewhere. Telegram remains functioning in spite of a wider internet shut down that began on August 9 and continued in spurts throughout the rest of the week. Only Telegram stayed online thanks to an anti-censorship tool developed by the Russian-born founder Pavel Durov on August 10 which allowed users to circumvent the government’s blocking of internet traffic.

“The authorities have spilled blood and will not stop unless we show our will power,” read one post on the Nexta Live channel on August 18. The message was viewed by 1.4 million people and included a schedule and a map for a planned “Liberation March” to Okrestina, one of Belarus’ most notorious detention centers in Minsk.

Powering Nexta and Belarus’ other top Telegram channels is a small team of admins, who spend their time sorting through the videos and tips sent to them from subscribers and posting them to their audiences.

"It's very stressful because every decision you make, every post you make, can impact the lives of millions," said the administrator for a network of eight Telegram channels, including, Belarus of the Brain, the country's second largest channel. 

The administrator, who asked to remain anonymous because of security concerns, acknowledged the potential pitfalls this power could unleash, including spreading disinformation. "It can be used for good and it can be used for bad as well. It depends who's managing what," he said, in a phone interview.

Although Lukashenko has publicly railed against Telegram’s “bandit” channels, accusing users of “spitting” on Belarus, the authorities have failed to bring the platform under its control. More than 12 admins have been jailed, but their channels keep running thanks to team members who manage to avoid being identified.

According to Haretski, the authorities “blew it” when it came to neutralizing Telegram and online media. 

“For a long time the authorities have been chasing after print newspapers while people, en masse, have been moving to the internet. You could say that independent media took over the internet. The same with Telegram,” he said.

With virtually no popular pro-government channels on Telegram, the platform largely belongs to Belarus’ growing opposition. Now, even state TV reporters have left their jobs to join the nationwide strike against the embattled president.

A former major in the security services who spoke to Coda Story via messenger apps on the condition of anonymity said that while officers in the Belarusian KGB — the agency still bears its Soviet-era name — monitored opposition groups online, the majority of resources were spent on preparing riot police in the run-up to the election.

“Half a year ago we started preparing the guys morally. We were brainwashing them about how important it is to preserve the regime and that there is no other path,” said the 29-year-old, who was expelled from Belarus this summer and now lives in Poland.

He added that the security services had been preparing for protests of 7,000 people at the most, not the 500,000 who gathered in Minsk last weekend.

Many who continued protesting this week showed up to demonstrations with photographs of Belarusians who had been detained and beaten by police. Pictured after their release, some stood in their underwear, revealing bodies covered in bruises.

Zhenya, a 23-year-old from Minsk, was arrested and detained when coming home from a neighborhood shop.

“For six hours we had to stand on our knees with our heads to the floor,” he said, in a phone interview. “No toilet or water. They would say, ‘Those who want to go to the toilet, go where you’re standing.’”

Later, Zhenya said a police chief walked in with officers holding batons and starting yelling: “‘Who is the best president in the world?’” Everyone stayed silent, so they began to beat us.”

“They put us on top of each other, like in a game of Tetris, and then the officers sat on top,” said  Artyom, 23, in a  phone interview. He was arrested while in a grocery store with his girlfriend on August 11. “When the last person entered our cell, he got so scared he shat himself. One man had an epileptic attack.”

Waiting outside the detention centers were small armies of volunteers who had come to document the thousands of cases of police brutality and bring medical aid to those who needed it. These gatherings had all been organized on Telegram.

With additional reporting by Katerina Fomina, Elizaveta Antonova and Tatiana Torocheshnikova

Photo by Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images

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