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.
If you're wondering, my own politics are centrist. I find there is excellent reporting—and plenty of bias and bad stuff, too—to be found in publications across the political spectrum. (And as someone who toils in media, I'll add I get frustrated with the left's refusal to acknowledge its own bias. While someone at Fox News is likely to say "Yeah, we're right wing—so what?" the liberal high priests at the New York Times or Columbia Journalism School will tell you, "We don't have an agenda. We perform JOURNALISM.") But that's getting beyond the topic at hand, which is whether the NPR president's slight involvement with Signal should lead us to distrust the app. The short answer is: That's ridiculous.
Whether or not an NPR person is on its board, Signal is open-source and encrypted, which is what you want if you care about security. Meanwhile, the consensus among cryptographers I've met—who don't strike me as raging leftists—is that Signal's tech is first-rate. It also doesn't hurt that the app was built by an American who is a hard-core privacy fanatic. Contrast that with Telegram, which lacks end-to-end encryption (even Mark Zuckerberg's WhatsApp has this!), has servers in Moscow, and is broadly suspected of being back-doored by the Kremlin. For me, this is an easy decision that has nothing to do with culture war stuff and everything to do with technology. Signal is the one I trust for privacy but, as they say, you do you.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
