The World’s Most Important App (For Now)
On Monday, in an 11-minute speech, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, reflected on his brief revolt against the Russian government. It was the capstone to a tense and confusing geopolitical crisis—and it took the form of a voice memo on the popular app Telegram, where it was subject to a form of instant feedback. Reviews have been mixed: 155,600 fire emoji to 131,900 clown emoji.
For close followers of the ongoing conflict in Russia and Ukraine, it’s not unusual to see playful reaction emoji sitting just beneath pictures, videos, and text documenting the horrors of war in real time. Since Russia’s invasion, one of the quickest ways to follow the chaos on the ground has been to download Telegram and wade through that the decade-old app was “the digital battle space,” a moniker that held up over the weekend as onlookers used Telegram to try to suss out whether Russia was heading into civil war.
