![]() What it offers is some degree of privacy and focus on the internet, a sphere where we frequently assume all our utterances are automatically for public consumption and where our concentration is scrambled every other second. Unlike the dominant social-media platforms, with their ping-pong of loud, public declarations all looking to grab maximum attention, a chat app operates on the kind of lower register that has always been crucial for a healthy civil society. Launched in 2013, Telegram has already shown itself to be enormously helpful for protesters in places such as Hong Kong and Belarus. In Eastern Europe, Telegram is proving the most popular of these platforms-just last summer it hit 1 billion downloads, with Russians being the second-most-frequent users in the world. Alongside them is a quieter, focused, and private medium that Ukrainians and Russians against the war have turned to: the chat app. Yet high-visibility social-media platforms are not the sole domain of resistance. It was also a sign that Putin is wary of the loud, public criticisms that have fueled many global protest movements over the past decade. The move was straight out of the contemporary dictator’s playbook: Take away the potential to go viral, and people can’t spread a narrative that might undermine the leader’s legitimacy. Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok were curtailed. Not long after tanks rolled into Ukraine, Vladimir Putin started to block social media at home.
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