In the year of our Lord 2024, is there any topic at all that can't become fodder for the culture wars? Apparently not. Case in point: The dumb-as-hell fracas that's broken out on X about the cryptographic integrity of two messaging apps, Telegram and Signal. The debate boils down to which app's technical standards are more likely to protect user privacy—a topic you would think is an empirical one to be decided by math nerds. Alas, this simple but important issue has, like a bystander caught by a stray bullet, been dragged into a larger culture war fight between Elon Musk, the public broadcaster NPR, and each side's respective groupies.
The messaging app turned culture war debate has been raging for a while now in niche circles (I tweeted about it a week ago in the context of crypto), but got pushed into the mainstream when the Guardian published a closer look at the forces driving it. In an essay published this weekend, a Stanford researcher describes how, after a longtime editor decided to rage quit over NPR's left-wing politics, conservatives began gunning for the broadcaster's CEO. In the ensuing fight, some loudmouth discovered that the CEO sat on the board of the Signal Foundation, and began making insinuations that Signal was somehow compromised because of this. And Musk, being who he is, piled on and began hinting without any evidence that a conspiracy was afoot.
