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Brokers infiltrated group chats for sale
Layers of openness
The government has long wanted to know what people say in social spaces, and bulk data is easiest to get where the space is open. Twitter, back when it carried that name, let anyone read everything public. Facebook is semi-closed, so a reader needs to log in and often needs to be friends with someone. Big group chats and Telegram channels are more closed still.
Brokers sprang up for each layer. Some collect public social media data from places like Twitter, some collect semi-private data from places like Facebook, and some collect private data from group chats.
Inside the group chats
Among the group chats were some very large ISIS-related ones and some very large protest-related ones in the United States. The companies got inside under false pretenses, copied the messages, and sold them to the government.
Local police departments also take an interest in who is saying what on social media about local politicians and the local school system.
Why is Telegram easier to collect from?
Standard Telegram group chats are encrypted between the app and Telegram's servers, but not end to end. Telegram's end-to-end encrypted secret chats work only between two people, not in groups. Public channels and groups with open invite links can be joined by anyone who finds the link. An account that joins, including an automated one, can log every message it can see.
How did Twitter's open data change?
For years Twitter let developers pull public posts in bulk through its programming interface, and researchers and companies built whole businesses on it. In 2023, after the service was renamed X, the company ended free access to that interface. It replaced the free tier with paid tiers.
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