“SimpleX, at its core, is designed to be truly distributed with no central server. This permits for big scalability at low price, and likewise makes it virtually unimaginable to listen in on the network graph,” Poberezkin wrote in an organization blog post published in 2022.
SimpleX’s policies expressly prohibit “sending illegal communications” and description how SimpleX will remove such content whether it is discovered. Much of the content that these terrorist groups have shared on Telegram—and are already resharing on SimpleX—has been deemed illegal within the UK, Canada, and Europe.
Argentino wrote in his evaluation that discussion about moving from Telegram to platforms with higher security measures began in June, with discussion of SimpleX as an option going down in July amongst quite a lot of extremist groups. Though it wasn’t until September, and the Terrorgram arrests, that the choice was made to migrate to SimpleX, the groups are already establishing themselves on the brand new platform.
“The groups which have migrated are already populating the platform with legacy material resembling Terrorgram manuals and are actively recruiting propagandists, hackers, and graphic designers, amongst other desired personnel,” the ISD researchers wrote.
Nevertheless, there are some downsides to the extra security provided by SimpleX, resembling the indisputable fact that it just isn’t as easy for these groups to network and due to this fact grow, and disseminating propaganda faces similar restrictions.
“While there may be newfound enthusiasm over the migration, it stays unclear if the platform will develop into a central organizing hub,” ISD researchers wrote.
And Poberezkin believes that the present limitations of his technology will mean these groups will eventually abandon SimpleX.
“SimpleX is a communication network slightly than a service or a platform where users can host their very own servers, like in OpenWeb, so we weren’t aware that extremists have been using it,” says Poberezkin. “We never designed groups to be usable for greater than 50 users and we’ve been really surprised to see them growing to the present sizes despite limited usability and performance. We don’t think it’s technically possible to create a social network of a meaningful size within the SimpleX network.”
This story originally appeared on wired.com.
