Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

With Parler down, there are going to be a ton of white supremacists switching to (or back to) @Telegram, a company that has sheltered some of the worst, most explicitly pro-terror Nazi groups for years now.

RT to tell @apple & @google to KICK TELEGRAM OFF their app stores, too.

Or, Telegram can actually enforce its terms of service.

But I am watching tons of Nazis thrill to the idea of mass murder on there.

They're emboldened, and @Telegram gives them a place to recruit, radicalize, and plan to kill people.

Parler was bad, but Telegram is the absolute wild west.

I've watched actual terror plots unfold there.

It's where they share printable gun plans and bomb how-tos.

It's where they discuss targets and share vicious, gory murder videos of minorities they don't like.

And I would also add, deplatforming the less dark-webby extremism platforms like Parler ALWAYS means a temporary influx to these more extremist, darker-webby platforms.

We saw it after 8chan, too.

It was necessary, it immediately and overwhelmingly cut down on successful deadly terror, but in the very short term I watched numbers swell in overtly terror Nazi channels as more radicalized/edgelors 8chan folks sought a new home.

Every time you shut down a major platform that's helping perpetuate extremism and terror, you have a narrow window to come for their backup platform before they regroup with even more overt extremists on that backup platform.

This is that window.

Let's be clear, deplatforming of extremists is *always* a good thing, and the deplatforming of Parler terrorists is no exception.

The name of the game is to *keep* making it exhausting for the last of the most dedicated true believers to regroup in new combinations elsewhere.

This is a critical moment for that work of disrupting US white supremacist terror networks.

We HAVE to take this shot.

@Apple and @google need to give @telegram an ultimatum: shut down the Terrorgram channels, or we'll shut you down in our app stores.

This is why Telegram is particularly suited to white supremacist terrorists, btw.

They literally did exactly what ISIS did on @telegram.

They stole the playbook.

https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1348687646193811456?s=19

And let's also be clear, it's easy to do this in a US stores-targeted way that specifically addresses the US situation.

It's absurd to suggest this would have to shut down Telegram internationally.