Quick Take

How to Deter Election Conspiracy Theorists and Extremists Mobilizing for Violence on Encrypted Messaging Platforms

October 30, 2024

With one week left before the U.S. election, concerns about online conspiracy theories leading to offline violence are intensifying. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis reportedly has been informing law enforcement agencies for weeks about plots by domestic violent extremists to carry out “lone wolf” attacks against election infrastructure, poll workers, and government officials. Sure enough, attacks against ballot boxes have been reported this month in Oregon and Washington state. While warning of a “heightened risk” of election-linked violence, the intelligence agency admitted to being unable to grasp the full scale of the threats due to extremists increasingly using encrypted online spaces.

A recent report by our Center highlighted the double-edged sword nature of encrypted platforms like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram. On the one hand, they provide essential tools for activists and dissidents to exercise their human rights to freedom of expression and assembly in repressive countries. On the other hand, they provide a secure communications infrastructure for criminals and violent agitators. End-to-end encryption, the cryptographic method that renders message content indecipherable for anyone except the senders and intended recipients, is in this sense actor-agnostic.

While our report mainly addressed abuse of encrypted platforms by political propagandists, it noted the vulnerability of these same spaces to exploitation by violent extremists. Such exploitation is not theoretical: The orchestrators of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol used Signal, among other chat apps, to plan their activities, and in 2020, far-right demonstrators used chat groups on Telegram to galvanize support for storming the German Parliament. Moreover, the DHS memos confirm that this exploitation is ongoing. Even more concerning, policymakers and platforms seem to be at a loss for how to discern and counter such threats when they appear and spread within the encrypted messaging ecosystem.

While our Center’s recent recommendations were primarily geared toward mitigating the problem of voter manipulation on encrypted apps, their implementation would help deter violent extremist activity on the same apps. A key recommendation is for platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp to resist their “feature bloat” tendency — whereby they continue adding virality-promoting features to encrypted messaging.

Combining broadcasting and social media features with encrypted chats enables both propagandists and extremists to carry out propaganda dissemination, recruitment, coordination, and mobilization for violence all in the same app. Thus, to stymie such efforts, the platforms should bifurcate their disparate services, applying end-to-end encryption only to individual and small group chats while leaving the rest of the content subject to rigorous moderation, third-party research, and — where legal and necessary — law enforcement investigation. Moreover, all platforms should have robust user reporting tools such that any plans for violence can be swiftly brought to platforms’ attention and escalated to law enforcement as appropriate.