Following the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and the announcement that the app would start cooperating with law enforcement regarding illegal content, ISD found that a large number of neo-Nazi accelerationist groups had begun migrating to a new, decentralised, encrypted platform, which ISD is choosing not to name to avoid undue amplification.

It “has numerous security features that extremists view as advantageous compared to Telegram – in addition to having end-to-end encryption activated by default for all messages, it boasts being the first chat platform that circumvents the need for user IDs,” said ISD Digital Research Analyst Steven Rai in conversation with the Guardian.

“On most social media platforms like Telegram, accounts are assigned a unique identifier that remains static even when users change their display name, which allows law enforcement and other investigators to track them across time and space, find out who they are communicating with, and possibly identify them.”

Our analysis featured in WIRED and the Guardian.