Telegram played a small but significant role in the 2020 election as an organising tool for planners of the January 6 attack. Photo / Jason Andrew, The New York Times
Right-wing groups, which use Telegram to organise real-world actions, are urging followers to watch the polls and stand up for their rights, in a harbinger of potential chaos.
Groups backing former President Donald Trump recently sent messages to organise poll watchers to be ready to dispute votes in Democratic areas. Some posted images of armed men standing up for their rights to recruit for their cause. Others spread conspiracy theories that anything less than a Trump victory on Tuesday (Wednesday NZ time) would be a miscarriage of justice worthy of revolt.
“The day is fast approaching when fence sitting will no longer be possible,” read one post from an Ohio chapter of the Proud Boys, the far-right organisation that was instrumental in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. “You will either stand with the resistance or take a knee and willingly accept the yoke of tyranny and oppression.”
The messages were all posted on Telegram, the lightly moderated social media platform with nearly 1 billion users, which has become a harbinger of the potential actions and chaos that could unfold on Election Day and after. More so than other social apps, Telegram is a prime organising tool for extremists, who have a tendency to turn digital coordination into real-world action.
A New York Times analysis of more than 1 million messages across nearly 50 Telegram channels with more than 500,000 members found a sprawling and interconnected movement intended to question the credibility of the presidential election, interfere with the voting process and potentially dispute the outcome. Nearly every channel reviewed by the Times was created after the 2020 election, highlighting the growth and increased sophistication of the election denialism movement.
The Times reviewed messages from “election integrity” groups across a dozen states, including battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan. Their posts overwhelmingly spewed disinformation and conspiracy theories and featured violent imagery.
More than 4000 of their posts went further by encouraging members to act by attending local election meetings, joining protest rallies and making financial donations, the analysis found. Posts from other right-wing groups reviewed by the Times urged followers to be prepared for violence. These calls to action extended the right-wing language typically found on other major social media sites into the physical world.
In New Hampshire, one Telegram channel instructed people to question local officials in person about absentee ballot tallies. In Georgia, followers of a local Telegram channel were urged to attend election board meetings to argue for limits to absentee voting. In New Mexico, people were told to monitor voting stations with cameras, file police reports if necessary and be ready to “fight like hell”.
“If you have ever said, ‘What can I do?,’ this is your opportunity,” said one post from a Telegram group focused on Pennsylvania.
Katherine Keneally, a former intelligence analyst with the New York Police Department, said views shared on Telegram should not be dismissed as the musings of a fringe minority but rather seen as a warning about what could happen on election day and beyond.
“Telegram is very often central to actually organising people to engage in offline activity,” said Keneally, who now works for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research firm that monitors Telegram. She recalled attending a meeting in 2022 of election sceptics in Montana, where participants taught one another how to use Telegram. Among more extreme movements, she said, Telegram is used “very strategically to radicalise and recruit”.
In a statement, Telegram, whose founder was arrested in France in August on charges related to the spread of illicit material on the service, said it had ramped up content moderation leading up to the election. The company added that it would co-operate with the authorities to remove “criminal content”.
“Telegram does not tolerate content that encourages disrupting legal democratic processes through violence or destruction of property,” it said.
Telegram played a small but significant role in the 2020 election as an organising tool for planners of the January 6 attack. Today, its influence is greater and potentially more ominous, according to the Times’ analysis.
Right-wing media channels post a stream of news, memes and misinformation about perceived voting irregularities, which are then picked up by other groups that use them to argue that the Democrats have begun to steal the election. Mixed in are calls for citizens to show up at the polls and to monitor and report irregularities – or fight if necessary.
“While other platforms are primarily about self-expression, ‘owning the libs’ and hateful buffoonery, Telegram often generates an ambience of ‘let’s get something done,’” said Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University.
The “election integrity” movement on Telegram includes a loose network of accounts devoted to “auditing” the vote and amplifying election malfeasance theories, such as false claims that election workers are giving Republican voters Sharpies that are incompatible with voting machines.
One channel focused on election auditing in New York featured recruitment ads from United Sovereign Americans, which calls itself a national “election validity” advocacy group. One of its lawyers is a former solicitor general of Pennsylvania who defended Trump during his second impeachment in 2021 after January 6.
Under an image of Uncle Sam and a bold red “WE NEED YOU!” banner, the group recently claimed, without any credible evidence, that 2022 voter records showed “millions of ‘irregularities’ which, when ignored, are election fraud”. Many claims about voter fraud have been debunked. The group did not respond to a request for comment.
Another group, focused on vote auditing in Pennsylvania, offered paid compensation for election monitors but only if they worked in the traditionally Democratic stronghold of Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is.
“Fill out your information, and we’ll contact you to get you trained and ready for Election Day!” the group said.
Another Telegram channel run by a group called the People’s Audit posted a video that offered a “hypothetical situation that is totally possible,” in which the Department of Homeland Security used the driver’s licences of immigrants in the country illegally to cast votes en masse for the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris. The video floated the scenario even though it is illegal and rare for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.
“Yes, they would be engaging in ID theft, election interference and treason, which is punishable by death,” the video concluded.
Kris Jurski, who posted the video, said on Telegram that it had been taken down from the social platform X. He said he was grateful that the video had remained on Telegram, which he used later to advertise a webinar teaching people how to secure voter rolls and deter fraud. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Many posts casting doubt on election reliability made their way into the channels of extremist groups like the Proud Boys, which has preferred Telegram to other platforms after being restricted by sites like Facebook, Instagram and X.
The group’s posts questioned why states might not be able to fully tally election results on election night and repeated misleading claims about voter registration numbers in Michigan. In one video, a truck with a Confederate flag chased after immigrant children, with a caption reading: “1/20/25: Trump is sworn in as President. 1/21/25: Me and the Proud Boys begin the deportation.”
“When you look at the postings, even if it’s not actually calling for violence or even if it’s not saying we need to get whoever, there’s a very ugly tone to it,” said Wendy Via, a founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which tracked a 317% spike in election denialism on Telegram in October. There was no significant left-wing movement like this, she said.
In recent months, many Telegram channels run by chapters of the Proud Boys have celebrated a return to relevance, including perceived attention from Trump and his allies. Several accounts pointed to the black-and-yellow ties and hats – which are Proud Boys colours – worn by Trump in the days before, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson during, a recent rally at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Asked whether Trump had intended to send a signal, a spokesperson for his campaign responded, “Lol. No.” Carlson did not respond to a request for comment but posted on X that the Times “knows a Proud Boys necktie when they see one”.
“They feel activated,” said Michael Loadenthal, who researches political violence at the University of Cincinnati, adding that Proud Boys groups had assembled publicly less often than they had before the 2020 election. “There’s a feeling they are in the right.”
Recruitment messages on the public Telegram accounts of various Proud Boys chapters have sought to capitalise on the perils of election fraud, often implying a need for violence. One popular image showed an armed man wearing a balaclava.
“Free men do not obey public servants,” it read.
Another portrayed a tit-for-tat with “leftist Democrats” going back to Trump’s presidency.
“Enough is enough!” read a part of the post. “Be ready for anything and everything!”
The Telegram channels reviewed in this article were provided in part by researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. The Times used software, including large language models, to organise and analyse the posts and to identify messages with calls to action.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano, Aaron Krolik and Steven Lee Myers
Photographs by: Jason Andrew, Bing Guan, Kenny Holston and Hiroko Masuike
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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