Telegram radicalised me...but I managed to break free

The app is in the news for its role in the riots. Ex-users tell Zoë Beaty how they fell down the rabbit hole, then woke up

- Zoë Beaty

One link. A click. A curious statement – “What they don’t want you to know!” It’s 2020 and Leila Hay is in her room, at the back of her parent’s terraced house in Hull, unaware that she’s about to fall down a rabbit hole. Before now she’s never heard of the social media app Telegram, or 4chan – an anonymous posting board that quickly became the home of internet subculture, and conspiracy. Soon, it would take the next year of her life.

“I saw a rambling post on pizzagate,” she explains – a famous, completely false theory about a child sex ring run from the basement of a pizzeria in Washington DC.

“To be honest, I was afraid,” she says. “I was petrified, actually. I kept reading, needing to know more. Because if all of this – what I was reading – was true, it would completely reshape my world.”

Within just a few weeks Hay, who was studying at university, was reading screenshots of Hillary Clinton’s emails, convinced she was a paedophile. She quickly began to believe posts predicting that Donald Trump was going to come forward with serious allegations and arrest warrants for “pretty much every celebrity, for child endangerment”, Hay says.

“There were accusations against celebrities, the media… for horrific crimes against children. Everyone thought I was crazy.” But, quickly, Hay was fully invested in the fantasies of the farright world, which, even off the app, were often disseminated as screenshots from Telegram. “In a way I was smug – you see yourself as above others. You’re told that others are just naive to any other possibilities.”

Over the last two weeks, Telegram has been noticeably present in headlines and discussion around the far-right riots. It was screenshots of this app that circulated from fascists organising gang violence in towns around the country; onTwitter/X, users perpetuating violence directed their followers to Telegram.