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Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram: Here's which secure messaging app you should use

Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram: Here's which secure messaging app you should use

If your choice of encrypted messaging app is a toss-up between Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp, do not waste your time with anything but Signal. This isn't about which one has cuter features, more bells and whistles or is the most convenient to use: It's purely about privacy. And if privacy's what you're after, nothing beats Signal.

You probably already know what happened. In a tweet heard 'round the world last January, tech mogul Elon Musk continued his feud with Facebook by advocating people drop its WhatsApp messenger and use Signal instead. Twitter's then-CEO Jack Dorsey retweeted Musk's call. Around the same time, right-wing social network Parler went dark following the Capitol attacks, while political boycotters fled Facebook and Twitter. It was the perfect storm -- the number of new users flocking to Signal and Telegram surged by tens of millions. 

Read more: Everything to know about Signal

The jolt also reignited security and privacy scrutiny over messaging apps more widely. Among the top players currently dominating download numbers, there are some commonalities. All are mobile apps available in the Google Play store and App Store that support cross-platform messaging, have group chat features, offer multifactor authentication and can be used to share files and multimedia. They all also provide encryption for texting, voice and video calls.

Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp use end-to-end encryption in some portion of their app, meaning that if an outside party intercepts your texts, they should be scrambled and unreadable. It also means that the exact content of your messages supposedly can't be viewed by employees of those companies when you are communicating with another private user. This prevents law enforcement, your mobile carrier and other snooping entities from being able to read your messages even when they intercept them (which happens more often than you might think). 

The privacy and security differences between Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp couldn't be bigger, though. Here's what you need to know about each of them. 

Getty/SOPA Images

• Does not collect data, only your phone number
• Free, no ads, funded by nonprofit Signal Foundation 
• Fully open-source
• Encryption: Signal Protocol

Signal is a typical one-tap install app that can be found in your normal marketplaces like Google Play and Apple's App Store and works just like the usual text-messaging app. It's an open-source development provided free of charge by the nonprofit Signal Foundation and has been famously used for years by high-profile privacy icons like Edward Snowden.

Signal's main function is that it can send -- to either an individual or a group -- fully encrypted text, video, audio and picture messages, after verifying your phone number and letting you independently verify other Signal users' identity. For a deeper dive into the potential pitfalls and limitations of encrypted messaging apps, CNET's Laura Hautala's explainer is a life-saver. 

When it comes to privacy, it's hard to beat Signal's offer. It doesn't store your user data. And beyond its encryption prowess, it gives you extended, onscreen privacy options, including app-specific locks, blank notification pop-ups, face-blurring antisurveillance tools and disappearing messages. 

Occasional bugs have proven that the tech is far from bulletproof, of course, but the overall arc of Signal's reputation and results have kept it at the top of every privacy-savvy person's list of identity protection tools. The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times (which also recommends WhatsApp) and The Wall Street Journal all recommend using Signal to contact their reporters safely. 

For years, the core privacy challenge for Signal lay not in its technology but in its wider adoption. Sending an encrypted Signal message is great, but if your recipient isn't using Signal, then your privacy may be nil. Think of it like the herd immunity created by vaccines, but for your messaging privacy. 

Now that Musk's and Dorsey's endorsements have sent a surge of users to get a privacy booster shot, however, that challenge may be a thing of the past. 

Getty/NurPhoto

• Data linked to you: Name, phone number, contacts, user ID
• Free, forthcoming Ad Platform and premium features, funded mainly by founder
• Only partially open-source
• Encryption: MTProto

Telegram falls somewhere in the middle of the privacy scale, and it stands apart from other messenger apps because of its efforts to create a social network-style environment. While it doesn't collect as much data as WhatsApp, it also doesn't offer encrypted group calls like WhatsApp, nor as much user data privacy and company transparency as Signal. Data collected by Telegram that could be linked to you includes your name, phone number, contact list and user ID. 

Telegram also collects your IP address, something else Signal doesn't do. And unlike Signal and WhatsApp, Telegram's one-to-one messages aren't encrypted by default. Rather, you have to turn them on in the app's settings. Telegram group messages also aren't encrypted. Researchers found that while some of Telegram's MTProto encryption scheme was open-source, some portions were not, so it's not completely clear what happens to your texts once they're in Telegram's servers. 

Telegram has seen several breaches. Some 42 million Telegram user IDs and phone numbers were exposed in March of 2020, thought to be the work of Iranian government officials. It would be the second massive breach linked to Iran, after 15 million Iranian users were exposed in 2016. A Telegram bug was exploited by Chinese authorities in 2019 during the Hong Kong protests. Then there was the deep-fake bot on Telegram that has been allowed to create forged nudes of women from regular pictures. Most recently, its GPS-enabled feature allowing you to find others near you has created obvious problems for privacy. 

I reached out to Telegram to find out whether there were any major security plans in the works for the app, and what its security priorities were after this latest user surge. I'll update this story when I hear back.

Angela Lang/CNET

• Data linked to you: Too much to list (see below)
• Free; business versions available for free, funded by Facebook
• Not open-source, except for encryption
• Encryption: Signal Protocol 

Let's be clear: There's a difference between security and privacy. Security is about safeguarding your data against unauthorized access, and privacy is about safeguarding your identity regardless of who has access to that data. 

On the security front, WhatsApp's encryption is the same as Signal's, and that encryption is secure. But that encryption protocol is one of the few open-source parts of WhatsApp, so we're being asked to trust WhatsApp more than we are Signal. WhatsApp's actual app and other infrastructure have also faced hacks, just as Telegram has. 

Jeff Bezos' phone was famously hacked in January of 2020 through a WhatsApp video message. In December of the same year, Texas' attorney general alleged -- though has not proven -- that Facebook and Google struck a back-room deal to reveal WhatsApp message content. A spyware vendor targeted a WhatsApp vulnerability with its software to hack 1,400 devices, resulting in a lawsuit from Facebook. WhatsApp's unencrypted cloud-based backup feature has long been considered a security risk by privacy experts and was one way the FBI got evidence on notorious political fixer Paul Manafort. To top it off, WhatsApp has also become known as a haven for scam artists and malware purveyors over the years (just as Telegram has attracted its own share of platform abuse, detailed above). 

Despite the hacks, it's not the security aspect that concerns me about WhatsApp as much as the privacy. I'm not eager for Facebook to have yet another piece of software installed on my phone from which it can cull still more behavioral data via an easy-to-use app with a pretty interface and more security than your regular messenger. 

When WhatsApp says it can't view the content of the encrypted messages you send to another WhatsApp user, what is doesn't say is that there's a laundry list of other data that it collects that could be linked to your identity: Your unique device ID, usage and advertising data, purchase history and financial information, physical location, phone number, your contact information and that of your list of contacts, what products you've interacted with, how often you use the app, and how it performs when you do. The list goes on. This is way more than Signal or Telegram. 

When I asked the company why users should settle for less data privacy, a WhatsApp spokesperson pointed out that it limits what it does with this user data, and that the data collection only applies to some users. For instance, financial transaction data collection would be relevant only to those WhatsApp users in Brazil, where the service is available. 

"We do not share your contacts with Facebook, and we cannot see your shared location," the WhatsApp spokesperson told CNET. 

"While most people use WhatsApp just to chat with friends and family, we've also begun to offer the ability for people to chat with businesses to get help or make a purchase, with health authorities to get information about COVID, with domestic violence support agencies, and with fact checkers to provide people with the ability to get accurate information," the spokesperson said. "As we've expanded our services, we continue to protect people's messages and limit the information we collect." 

Is WhatsApp more convenient than Signal and Telegram? Yes. Is it prettier? Sure. Is it just as secure? We won't know unless we see more of its source code. But is it more private? Not when it comes to how much data it collects comparatively. For real privacy, I'm sticking with Signal and I recommend you do the same. 

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https://pemudij.pops.my.id/

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20 spooky games for Halloween on Apple Arcade

20 spooky games for Halloween on Apple Arcade

Halloween is almost here, and spooky mysteries with a dash of suspense are a satisfying October staple. Apple Arcade -- Apple's $5 per month mobile gaming subscription -- has almost 220 games in its catalog, including plenty of spooky titles. 

We picked out 20 games that are perfect for getting into the spooky season spirit. Here's what to play: 

Bleak Sword

Developer: Devolver Digital

Bleak Sword on Apple Arcade. 

Screenshot/Devolver

Bleak Sword is a dark retro fantasy action game full of evil creatures you must slay in order to break a legendary curse. Dodge, roll and parry against randomly generated enemies across nine chapters of swaps, forests and castles.

The Bradwell Conspiracy

Developer: Bossa Studios and A Brave Plan

Bossa Studios

The Bradwell Conspiracy is a narrative-driven first-person game where you have to uncover the truth behind the explosion that destroyed the Bradwell Electronics facility. At the start of the game, you wake up in the rubble with only a computerized voice in your "smart glasses" to guide you. The glasses guide eventually connects you to another person trapped inside the facility, and you must try to escape together. 

Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls

Developer: Konami Digital Entertainment 

Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls on Apple Arcade

Apple

Dracula is quintessentially Halloween. Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls is a side-scroller action game that features a number of characters from the original gothic fantasy series and its creators, Ayami Kojima and Michiru Yamane. The game is set after Dracula has been sealed away, and you can play as Alucard, Charlotte, Maria, Simon Belmont and more as you battle your way through Dracula's army.

Cozy Grove

Developer: Spry Fox

Cozy Grove on Apple Arcade.

Apple

Cozy Grove is like a haunted version of Animal Crossing , and it's adorable. In the game, you're a Spirit Scout tasked with bringing peace to the adorably haunted island of Cozy Grove. Explore the island, collect resources and craft items to survive, tend your fire -- Flamey -- and try to help the lost forest ghosts. The more you help, the more the island heals -- the environment becomes colorized and flowers grow.

Creaks

Developer: Amanita Design

Creaks on Apple Arcade.

Apple

Creaks is an intricate puzzle platformer game that seeks to solve the mystery of what exactly goes bump in the night. In the game, you're spending a quiet evening in your room when the light starts flickering and the ground trembles. The wallpaper pulls back to reveal a secret door, and someone, or something, is making noise in there. Grab your flashlight and explore a mysterious subterranean world of bird people. Lurking in the shadows are deadly, shape-shifting monsters. But don't worry -- when you shine a light on them, they transform into harmless furniture.

Don't Starve: Pocket Edition

Developer: Klei

Don't Starve: Pocket Edition on Apple Arcade

Screenshot by CNET

Don't Starve: Pocket Edition puts you in the role of Wilson, a scientist, transported to a mysterious, unexplored wilderness full of unidentified creatures, dangers and surprises. You must help Wilson fight off enemies, research, navigate the environment, craft resources, gather items, solve the mystery of the strange land and ultimately survive. 

The Get Out Kids

Developer: Frosty Pop

The Get Out Kids on Apple Arcade.

Screenshot by CNET

The Get Out Kids mixes mystery with nostalgia, taking players back to 1984. Molly, Salim and Molly's dog Moses sneak out one night to catch a late showing of the Ghostblasters movie at the local drive-in. Along the way, they have to navigate creepy woods and sneak past the surly cemetery groundskeeper. When Moses goes missing suddenly and suspiciously, Molly and Salim begin an adventure to find out what happened to their canine friend. This narrative-driven game includes puzzles, hidden object searches and more. 

Hitchhiker

Developer: Versus Evil and Mad About Pandas

Hitchhiker on Apple Arcade. 

Hitchhiker/Screenshot by Shelby Brown/CNET

Hitchhiker is a mystery game where you play as a hitchhiker with no memory of your past or destination. By catching rides with five strangers across a landscape of rolling hills, you must try and figure out who you are as well as find a mysterious missing friend. Everyone has a story to tell, but not everything is what it seems. Search the vehicles for clues and choose your words carefully to bring hidden parts of your identity to light -- and prepare for the dangers ahead. The longer you're on the road, the more your grasp on reality loosens.

Inmost

Developer: Hidden Layer Games and Chucklefish Games

Inmost on Apple Arcade. 

Hidden Layer Games

Inmost, a hidden-object platformer, immediately drops players into a creepy world inside a mysterious house. You'll play as multiple characters whose storylines are more connected than they might seem at first. Navigate a strange castle and dodge menacing shadows on your path to find answers.

Jenny LeClue

Developer: Joe Russ and Ben Tillet

Jenny LeClue on Apple Arcade.

Jenny LeClue/Twitter

Jenny LeClue envelops players in a mystery-adventure-thriller narrative, guided by choices you make. The game is set in the seemingly idyllic town of Arthurton, where you play as Jenny, a kid sleuth who is eager to prove her worth as a detective. When your mother is accused of murder, you set out to prove the truth. As you seek out answers, you quickly realize that nothing and no one in Arthurton are what they seem. 

Layton's Mystery Journey

Developer: Level 5

Layton's Mystery Journey on Apple Arcade. 

Apple/Screenshot by CNET

Layton's Mystery Journey sets up a Sherlock Holmes meets Studio Ghibli environment to tell the story of Katrielle Layton -- a young detective out to unravel the mystery of her father's disappearance. Visit the crime scene, investigate with your magnifying glass, interview witnesses and suspects, collect clues and solve puzzles to crack the case. The puzzles in the game start off simple, and you can use coins to get clues if you get stuck. The more difficult a puzzle is, the higher its coin value. Earning coins also grants you access to end-game bonuses that help you solve your case. 

Murder Mystery Machine

Developer: Blazing Griffin

Murder Mystery Machine on Apple Arcade. 

Apple Arcade

In Murder Mystery Machine, you're a detective out to prove yourself when a murder case comes across your desk. Explore the crime scene, collect evidence, interview suspects and make deductions to solve the case. You can get hints from your partner if you get stuck, but he's a bit surly. The game releases mysteries in episodes, and the first one is about a murdered politician. Fans of detective procedurals like Law & Order might like this game.

Necrobarista

Developer: Route 59

Necrobarista on Apple Arcade.

Apple/Screenshot by Shelby Brown/CNET

Anime-style supernatural game Necrobarista tells the story of Maddy Xiao -- a barista and amateur necromancer -- is the new owner of the Terminal, a coffee shop that welcomes the dead to walk among the living for one night. Under the tutelage of coffee expert and necromancer Chay Wu, Maddy must navigate the Council of Death's rules, the ethics of life and death, and what it means to let go. 

Neo Cab

Developer: Chance Agency

Neo Cab on Apple Arcade.

Apple/Screenshot by Shelby Brown/CNET

Neo Cab is a survival game for the digital age embroiled in a mystery. You play as Lina, the last human taxi driver in a world overcome by automation. When you move to Los Ojos to reconnect with your best friend, Savy, she vanishes. With no other options, you must keep taking passengers to earn money and get information about Savy's disappearance. This becomes increasingly difficult as you progress. Keep an eye on your Feelgrid bracelet to stay in tune with your emotions and ultimately remain human in this tech-noir game. 

Neversong

Developer: Serenity Forge

Neversong on Apple Arcade.

Apple/Screenshot by Shelby Brown/CNET

Neversong is a side-scroller style puzzle game where you play as young Peet, who, upon waking from a coma, finds himself in a nightmare. With his girlfriend nowhere to be found, Peet must navigate the frightening halls of Blackfork Asylum and try to understand the sometimes-violent behavior of adults. The more he explores, the more the secrets of his past unfurl. Neversong has six levels to explore, including Red Wind Field and Blackfork Asylum, which are all packed with bosses to defeat. Armed with a baseball bat, his childhood friends and his pet bird, Peet will set out to learn the truth about his coma.

Nuts

Developer: Noodlecake 

Nuts on Apple Arcade.

Apple

Nuts is a surveillance mystery game that's lightheartedly reminiscent of Firewatch. The squirrel population in Melmoth Forest is acting suspiciously and it's up to you, as a field researcher, to get to the bottom of it. Pack up your map, cameras, motion sensors, thermal imaging tech and GPS for the weirdest surveillance mission ever. Along the way, you'll be tasked with missions: Placing cameras, observing footage, tracking the squirrels' movements and more. The whole time, you're in communication with Professor Nina Scholz. With all that gear, plus your logic and wit, will you be able to uncover a bigger conspiracy?

The Room Two

Developer: Fireproof Games

The Room Two on Apple Arcade

Screenshot by CNET

The Room Two is a gorgeous 3D mystery puzzle game. You must follow a trail of letters left behind by a mysterious scientist with the initials A.S. The game is intricate and requires a tactile approach to solving in-depth, multistep puzzles.

Survival Z

Developer: Ember Entertainment

Survival Z on Apple Arcade.

Apple

Survival Z is a fun tower-defense-style strategy game that drops you into a world crippled by a zombie outbreak. You play as Megan, a loner mechanic who's savvy with a crossbow. When she meets Marcus, another survivor with intel on a diner potentially stocked with supplies, the pair head off on a journey, salvaging and upgrading equipment and battling waves of zombies along the way. 

Tangle Tower

Developer: SFB Games

Tangle Tower on Apple Arcade.

Apple Arcade

In this clever, colorful game, Detective Grimoire and his sardonic partner Sally are on the hunt for the murderer of Freya Fellow in the mysterious Tangle Tower. The clues come pouring in long before you cross the first threshold to find out that the prime suspect is a painting. Investigate, explore, gather evidence, question suspects and solve puzzles to discover the truth. 

World's End Club

Developer: IzanagiGames

World's End Club on Apple Arcade

Apple

World's End Club  is perhaps the darkest game on Apple Arcade so far. In the game, a busload of ragtag students known as the Go-Getters Club are on a field trip when a mysterious meteor causes the bus to crash. The kids awaken in a creepy theme park under the sea called World's End Land, and try to regroup. Suddenly, a floating harlequin named Pielope appears, and commands them to play a Game of Fate. As the stakes get higher, friendships are put to the test. Pielope's psychotic game sends the Go-Getter's Club on a dangerous adventure. 

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When Local Newspapers Fold, Polarization Rises. Here's What You Can Do

When Local Newspapers Fold, Polarization Rises. Here's What You Can Do

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, rising energy costs and our ongoing struggles with the coronavirus pandemic take up a lot of our attention these days. But there's more going on a lot closer to home -- you just might not know it, because your local newspaper is gone.

More than a quarter of hometown newspapers have disappeared in the last century, leaving about 70 million Americans with little or no way to stay informed about their city and county governments, schools or businesses. As the country heads toward the 2022 midterm elections, Americans are increasingly turning to friends and social media to stay informed -- which isn't always trustworthy, as we learned during the 2016 election when around 44% of Americans were exposed to disinformation and misinformation through untrustworthy websites. 

"The state of local news in America is dire," said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean of Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and head of the Medill Local News Initiative.

Local journalism isn't just a nice idea. Community newspapers report some of the most important stories in our country. That includes the Boston Globe's 2002 series exposing the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston's sex abuse of minors, Sara Ganim and The Patriot-News' coverage revealing Penn State sex abuse scandal involving Jerry Sandusky and the Charleston Gazette-Mail's 2017 expose on opioids flooding into West Virginia. 

This is part of Citizen Now, a package that aims to empower readers with information about our changing world. 

CNET

But for every Pulitzer Prize-winning local journalism story, there are countless more that have  served as chroniclers of their communities and watchdogs of the people in power. And when they aren't there, research from the Brookings Institute found there's generally more government waste and fraud. 

"When you have less local news, there's various effects, some of which you'd find predictable: lower voting turnout, more corruption, more waste," said Steven Walden, president and co-founder of Report For America, a nonprofit that funds young reporters to work in understaffed newsrooms throughout the US. "There's also evidence that you have more polarization and misinformation."

The journalism industry has been struggling to adapt. Advertising, once a vital part of the newspaper world, has shifted to online. Meanwhile, profit-hungry newspaper owners have chosen to lay off staff and reduce the quality of their products.

Nonprofit organizations have stepped up to support newsrooms in several ways, but ultimately, they live or die by their communities. Many local papers and radio stations depend on individual donations to fund reporting that would never be done by larger publications, covering civic meetings and investigating local issues that lead to exposés which fix injustices. Even simply signing up for and reading local news draws people closer to issues that affect them -- and reinforces what publications do.

"Most of these stories weren't big but they mattered immensely to the residents in a community larger outlets didn't regularly cover," said Greg Yee, now a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, speaking about his year writing for the Farmington Daily Times in Farmington, New Mexico. (Full disclosure: Yee is a former colleague of this article's author.) Stories that stick out from that time include a mobile home park cut off from natural gas in winter and a new gas station opening in a Navajo Nation community, the only fuel access in 30 miles, that significantly improved locals' quality of life. 

"A good local news organization is a problem solver: it identifies problems and helps a community come together to solve it," said Penelope Abernathy, visiting professor at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, who heads a site dedicated to mapping news deserts, areas with one or zero local papers. "And a good news organization shows you how you are related to people you may not know you're related to in another part of the county, region or state."

The Washington Post / Getty Images

Long, withering decline

Journalism jobs have been shrinking for decades, driven by declining newspaper circulation and the rise in digital advertising. The news industry's advertising and subscription businesses have roughly halved over the past decade. Much of that money's shifted to Google, Facebook and Amazon, which together now hold 64% of the US online advertising market.

For newspapers, that shift in spending is catastrophic. In the decade after the great recession in 2009, the Pew Research Center found newspaper newsroom employment in the US had dropped by more than half, to about 35,000 workers. 

Ironically, the news industry has more readers than ever before – upwards of 10 times as many, according to Danielle Coffey, vice president and general council of the News Media Alliance. 

"We don't have a broken product. It's being consumed at exponential rates," she said. "The source of the problem is the revenue problem."

It wasn't always this way. 

The founding fathers believed so strongly in newspapers as a public good that they set up government subsidies for postal rates, reducing the cost of distributing the news – which at the time, was delivered on horseback.

In the 1960s and '70s, though, publicly traded paper owners began fixating on profits. To impress shareholders, news organizations conglomerated into big chains that gobbled up local papers into regional networks, said Amanda Lotz, professor of the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University.

"The financialization pressure really moves [newspapers] away from the balance between a commercial and public service enterprise of providing news to a community," Lotz said. 

Rounds of acquisitions resulted in the gutting of editorial budgets and staff. With fewer reporters, newspapers started relying on national stories published by wire services, a trend that created "ghost papers" that had little or no local content. Meanwhile, the internet became an easy substitution for things online that had until then been exclusive to the paper, like weather, sports scores, classifieds and even news.

Venture capitalists and other financial firms began buying up newspapers in the 1980s but rapidly accelerated in the last two decades, growing to own over 23% of US newsrooms today while wringing out profits with more layoffs.

"Those losses put more strain on already stretched newsrooms and the publications ended up churning through staff," said Yee, who worked for four years at a pair of newspapers owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital. "All of that translates into worse, inconsistent coverage of the communities they're trying to serve."

As a result, from 2004 until the start of the pandemic in 2020, the US lost a quarter (around 2100) of its newspapers, according to a report from the University of North Carolina's Hussman School of Journalism and Media. By the end of last year, another hundred were gone, Poynter reported, expanding news deserts that are mostly located in financially-impacted rural areas in the country's interior.

Some papers have tried to rely more heavily on subscriptions, while transitioning to mainly digital publishing. Some success stories include the Chattanooga Times Free Press, which has been operating since 1869. Last September, it switched to a daily digital edition and a single print edition on Sunday from a daily print edition. The publication spent $6.1 million to give all its monthly subscribers iPads and train them one-on-one how to use them to access their daily paper, and it's retained subscribers through the transition. 

"There are some real success stories in this transition. If you can lower your paper costs and your distribution costs and if you can attract enough digital subscribers, you can support a local newsroom on that. But many local news organizations are still getting a significant chunk of their revenue from print advertising," Medill's Franklin said.

Bloomberg / Getty News

Legislative fix, maybe

One way the news industry could regain revenue and profit is to seek compensation from big tech platforms. After all, advocates say, Facebook, Google, Twitter make money selling ads next to links, videos and photos published and shared freely to their networks. 

Legislators in Australia were the first to pass a law in February 2021 requiring Google and Facebook to negotiate with publishers for compensation to use their work, while France followed with its own legislation shortly thereafter. The latter locked horns with Google before finally securing legal assurance that the search giant would pay local media outlets when they appear in search results. Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation lament that the Australian and French laws ensured deals for big media publishers at the expense of smaller ones, but that hasn't stopped  Canada and the UK from gearing up to pass their own versions. 

A version of that idea in the US, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, was proposed in March, 2021 by Senators Amy Klobuchar, Rand Paul, Cory Booker, and Lindsey Graham -- a rare bipartisan effort. The bill would allow news organizations to collectively bargain with tech companies for compensation, but hasn't moved out of committee yet.

Another idea to fund journalism Is the Local Journalism Sustainability Act introduced a year ago in the House by Representatives Ann Kirkpatrick and Dan Newhouse. That bill, if it were to become law, would give newsrooms around $50,000 annually in tax breaks to hire reporters. Small businesses, meanwhile, would receive $5,000 for the first year to advertise in local papers, and Americans would get a $250 stipend to pay for news subscriptions. It's unlikely to pass, though, in part because of partisan bickering over other spending plans on Capitol Hill.

"We need to make sure these publications can sustain themselves through this crisis and beyond, and I believe the credits in this bill make significant progress in providing a pathway to that sustainability," Rep. Kirkpatrick said when announcing the bill. 

Nonprofit newsrooms 

Some news organizations are finding funding beyond ads and subscriptions. Nonprofit foundations and philanthropic organizations are funneling grants and other aid money to newsrooms, including a new wave of nonprofit publications, like ProPublica, which run mostly on foundation and individual donations.

The American Journalism Project is a self-described venture philanthropy firm that to date has raised $90 million to back 32 local nonprofit newsrooms. Founded in 2019, it's also helped launch four more, taking the startup incubation model and applying it to digital newsrooms.

The organization focuses on both funding newsrooms and guiding them toward self-sustainability by diversifying their revenue streams, said Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project. Newsrooms they've helped grow by around 67% in their first year and are projected to double their revenue in three years. 

"Will local news only be nonprofit? No. Is nonprofit news vital for the future of an informed citizenry? We think so," Berman said.

Report For America, founded in 2017, describes itself as a service organization, which helps pair young reporters fresh out of college with legacy newsrooms. The organization financially supports the reporter by paying half their salary (up to $25,000) the first year, then a third (up to $20,000) the following year. After that, it's up to the publication to decide whether to hire them permanently. 

"If you're not in New York or Boston or Washington, some of these news organizations have trouble getting people to go out to smaller towns," said Report For America's Waldman. "We have a very significant recruiting operation and are able to create a sort of self-selected group of people who are really passionate about local."

Report For America has grown its graduating class to 130 reporters this year, up from its first class of 13 in 2018 -- to date, over 560 reporters have gone through the program and partnered with local newsrooms. They include Laura Roche of the Charlotte News & Observer writing about the fraught debate over museums returning the unethically sourced remains of Black people, Sierra Clark of the Traverse City Record-Eagle writing about Melissa Isaac and many others in her Anishinaabek Neighbors series, and Brandon Drenon of the Indianapolis Star writing about the NAACP and others criticizing Indiana schools for failing Black students.

Report for America also connects newsrooms with donors in their area in an effort to get the community more involved in funding its local news again.

"Our goal is to actually help change the local business models in a way that they can sustain that," Waldman said.

The nonprofit Knight Foundation pledged to give $300 million to news organizations in 2019, some of which will go to both the American Journalism Project and Report For America, among other nonprofits that in turn support local newsrooms -- efforts that can be seen city by city on this interactive map. The flow of financial support is important for local newsrooms that operate on nonprofit and for-profit models, which are both valuable to their communities, said Jim Brady, vice president of the Knight Foundation's journalism program.

"Nonprofits tend to be more investigative or enterprise in nature, and the for-profits tend to provide more information on how consumers can live their daily lives. So we think both must be part of the answer to how local news can thrive," Brady said. 

An infographic from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media's project website, The Expanding News Desert, headed by Penelope Abernathy.

UNC Hussman

What to do if you don't have local journalism

News experts have advice for what to do if you live in a news desert, with little or no coverage. First on the list: Stop thinking that social media posts are an informative replacement for reporting. Social media can help people know what's going on, but it's rife with bias and misinformation. 

"There's a proliferation of misinformation and disinformation that goes unchecked because there's no local journalist checking on the facts. [Social media is] a place where unvetted gossip can get spread," Franklin said.

People need to learn to spot misinformation that's spread on social media by publications that look like they're trustworthy but aren't. Both the World Health Organization and the Poynter Institute have their own free online courses to learn how to fact-check posts yourself -- not just to spot fake news, but also to understand the agenda behind why they're spreading in the first place.

In the voids left by local papers, citizen journalists and bloggers have stepped up to provide their communities with informative coverage, but they lack the oversight and vetting a newsroom provides. For lack of better options, a citizen reporter could start a site on Substack and write about local events, Franklin suggested. 

The best thing to do is to reach out to regional papers the next town over and request coverage. You can find your nearest local or regional paper on Newspapers.com or  NewspaperMap.com. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has a station finder site too, and if you're a fan of National Public Radio, you can sign up to become a member of your local station in order to help support it. It isn't a perfect solution for an existing newsroom to stretch to cover another area, but is far better than starting a new local publication from scratch. 

But if your community decides to launch a new publication, organizing it as a nonprofit newsroom is a successful way to go. They rely on donations -- foundation support and individual giving account for a combined 83% of nonprofit revenue, according to the Institute of Nonprofit Newsrooms' 2021 Index. And that model is working: 83 of the over 400 nonprofit newsrooms affiliated with INN are less than five years old.

Then there's nonprofit newsroom Berkeleyside, which hosted the so-called first 'direct public offering' where it solicited a combined $1 million in funding from 355 of its readers (an average of $2,816 per person) in 2018 to get started. These are technically securities, but sold directly to its readers, and the publication continues to publish today. It's one of many ways newsrooms are innovating new ownership structures to stay solvent.

"We need to get more support from communities, from local community foundations, from national media foundations and from high net-worth individuals to help make local news sustainable in all areas of the country," Brady said.

Correction, June 28: The original version of this story incorrectly stated how many reporters were in Report For America's first graduating class. Its first graduating class of reporters was in 2018 and had 13 members.

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Russia 20 billion a day how long has russia been around facts about russia today what did russia do today why is russia taking so long russia spending on war how much money has russia spent on the war why has russia invaded ukraine how russians sneeze how russia will collapse

How Russia has spent a decade crumbling online freedoms

How Russia has spent a decade crumbling online freedoms

Aleksandr Litreev was on a way to a business meeting last February when his life changed forever. En route to a hotel in Yakaterinburg, a day's drive east of Moscow, Litreev was pulled over by police. When they asked him to hand over his phone, the then-24-year-old knew it was no routine traffic stop. 

"They took me to a police station," Litreev recalls, "and magically some drugs appear." Litreev said he was arrested by around 10 armed policemen, beaten into confessing to ecstasy possession, and then detained for a month. He managed to flee to Estonia after being released into house arrest. 

Litreev is a member of Russia's liberal opposition. Rather than rousing people to the ballot box, he builds internet tools that help everyday Russians fight against an increasingly controlling state. As part of the tightest squeeze on freedoms in Russia this century, critical online media publications have been labeled foreign agents, and platforms like Twitter and Facebook are being pressured to purge their platforms of content the Kremlin disapproves of. 

With Russia's parliamentary elections running on Sept. 17 through Sept. 19, the Kremlin has stepped up censorship. It's demanded keywords associated with the opposition be blocked from Google and Yandex, the domestic search giant, and that Google and Apple kick an opposition-made app from their app stores.

Litreev has been fighting back for years, creating an app that sends lawyers to defend arrested protesters and joining the "digital resistance" that countered the government's attempt to block encrypted-messenger Telegram.

"If I go back to Russia now, I will get something like lifetime imprisonment," Litreev said. "Not gonna happen." 

Before fleeing to Estonia, Litreev also worked with Alexei Navalny, who, for the last 10 years, has been the face of Russia's opposition to President Vladimir Putin. Navalny was poisoned by Russian spies in August 2020 and has since been jailed. Navalny's case shows how the Kremlin has lost any of the patience it once had: He was tolerated for nearly a decade -- as a popular blogger, investigative journalist and later an opposition politician -- before authorities attempted to eliminate him altogether.

"The things that are happening now have never happened before," said Litreev, explaining that authorities poisoning an opposition candidate would have been inconceivable as recently as 2017. "And now we're here." 

Aleksandr Litreev, a software developer who fled to to Estona amid Russia's opposition crackdown.

Aleksandr Litreev

Digital wargames 

In 2017, Litreev made his first significant venture into opposition politics. A YouTube expose from Navalny alleged that then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev had embezzled over $1.2 billion, sparking protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg that turned into a general rebuke of widespread corruption and political repression.

Litreev's contribution was an app called Red Button. If protesters thought they were at risk of arrest, they could open the app and press the big red button it presented. That would automatically call a lawyer, who also receives the protester's emergency contact details and a GPS signal of their location.

"It's basically Uber, but for a lawyer," Litreev said. It was used extensively by demonstrators at the time, which got the attention of Kremlin authorities. "That's the point where pressure on me started," he added.

Litreev, then 21 and fresh out of university, was motivated to join the opposition movement as he watched the Kremlin ratchet up internet restrictions. A 2014 law allowed the telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, to block access to online media that called for "unsanctioned mass public events." In 2016, Putin signed a bill requiring telecommunications companies to store their customers' text messages and phone calls for up to six months. 

The law was used as a pretext to ban Telegram, a platform created by eccentric Russian-born developer Pavel Durov that doubles as an instant messenger and a social media platform. (Durov is now based in Dubai.) It allows for encrypted messages between people, like WhatsApp, but also for public figures and groups to create "channels" that can have millions of followers. Russian authorities wanted control over Telegram, and stopping them became Litreev's next project.

Thousands rallied for "internet freedom" in 2018 after Roskomnadzor banned Telegram. Many protested by bringing paper planes, Telegram's symbol.

Mikhail Tereshchenko/Getty

In 2018, the Kremlin ordered Durov to hand over keys that would allow the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB, to unscramble the app's encrypted messages. Roskomnadzor's stated goal was to fight terrorist attacks, like a 2017 train bombing in St. Petersburg, which it claimed were spreading thanks to Telegram and apps like it. Durov refused, calling the request both unconstitutional and technically untenable. What followed was a game of hide-and-seek that lasted for two years.

Roskomnadzor banned Telegram in April 2018, pulling down the app's servers. Scores of Russian internet users -- dubbed the Digital Resistance -- countered by hosting Telegram on proxy servers, which Roskomnadzor found and banned too. For his part, Litreev helped create software that deployed millions of proxy servers at once, making it impossible for Russian authorities to manually pull them down individually.

"They got tired of banning IP address by IP address, so they started to ban whole subnetworks, ranges of IP addresses," he said. "At some point, when we got our service hosted on Amazon and on Google Cloud, they accidentally banned a huge subnet which belongs to Google."

Those attempts to ban Telegram were unsuccessful. Not only did the service remain accessible, its Russian user base actually grew. Meanwhile, with authorities hastily banning up to 19 million IP addresses, Google and Amazon services were briefly unusable throughout Russia.

Roskomnadzor had a choice: either block a huge range of IP addresses and risk more catastrophic blackouts, or rescind the ban on Telegram. "It was a fight for all or nothing," Litreev said.

After two years, Roskomnadzor relented, lifting its Telegram ban last June on the grounds that the company would help it with terrorism inquiries in the future. The Digital Resistance won this battle, the latest in a war that had been going on since 2012. 

Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin in 2012. 

Natalia Kolesnikova/Getty

The first ruling 

Russia is often grouped with China as a troublesome autocracy. A common misconception related to this comparison is that Russia has always had a fiercely censored internet. But unlike China's internet, which was built from the ground up not to rely on Western companies or users, Russia's internet largely grew freely from the mid-'90s. 

That began to change in 2012, when Putin became president for the second time.

Much like the US, Russian presidents were bound by the constitution to serve no more than two consecutive four-year terms. So in 2008, when Putin swapped places with Dmitry Medvedev, becoming prime minister while Medvedev assumed the presidency, many suspected it was a ploy to circumvent constitutional limits. Those suspicions were confirmed when he announced his intention to run as president again in 2011.

When Putin's United Russia party retained a majority in the parliamentary elections two months later -- elections local monitors and the EU said were fraudulent -- protests erupted. Tens of thousands demanded free elections and the release of political prisoners. But what concerned the Kremlin wasn't the demonstrators, but how they managed to organize themselves. These protests were the biggest the country had seen since the '90s, and they were powered by social media.

"The driving force back then was the internet -- social media, Facebook and Twitter," said Andrei Soldatov, a journalist and co-author of The Red Web, a book that details Russia's tightening grip on internet freedoms. "That was the moment the Kremlin started paying attention to this new threat, and it was absolutely clear that it was the big thing for years to come."

The "Snow Revolution" protests in Moscow, 2011.

Epsilon/Getty

Online freedoms began unraveling a month after Putin took office in 2012. The Russian Duma (the lower house of the Federal Assembly) started drafting an internet restriction bill that lawmakers claimed was necessary to protect minors from child sexual abuse material, online drug markets and content that encouraged self harm. In practice, it allowed government authorities to create an internet blacklist.

Roskomnadzor now had legal cover to pull down websites it didn't like. Today, the internet in Russia is still markedly more open than it is in countries like China, Egypt and Vietnam. But Russia's strategy of censorship is more subtle, focused less on suppressing speech than on oppressing competition.

"The idea is not to prevent you from getting information," Soldatov said. "The idea is to discourage you from participating in political activities of any kind, online or offline." 

The Kremlin's aversion to political opposition explains why political protests are often followed by a tightening of controls. The Moscow demonstrations of 2011 and 2012 led to the first internet restriction bill, and Telegram was targeted in 2018 after protests were organized on the platform. 

Then, in 2019, the opposition began translating online engagement into electoral victories.

A new era

Activists, journalists and opposition politicians had proven adept at maneuvering around the digital barriers the Kremlin had been throwing up since 2012. Navalny continued to use his prominent online platform to trouble authorities. Though demonized on state TV, many of his YouTube documentaries on shadowy Kremlin activities racked up hundreds of millions of views. Older Russians who regularly watched Russian television thought Navalny was a menace. Many middle-class, internet-savvy Russians, however, were receptive to his cause.

Though the Kremlin punished Navalny in various ways, convicting him on trumped-up fraud charges and barring him from running for office, authorities showed some restraint in suppressing his movement.

"Navalny was tolerated for a decade," said William Partlett, a professor at Melbourne Law School who researches post-Soviet societies and is authoring a book on Navalny. "He was exposing high-level corruption among very important, powerful people in the inner circle of the Kremlin. And he was allowed to do that, and I think the idea was, 'we can manage this guy.'" 

That changed in 2019. Navalny, unable to run for Moscow city council himself, encouraged his followers to adopt the "smart voting" doctrine. It meant voting for anyone other than the ruling United Russia party, be they liberals, avowed communists or hardcore nationalists. The plan worked: The "systemic opposition" won 20 of Moscow's 45 seats, reducing the United Russia Party's majority from 38 to 25.

The same system was used successfully in regional elections, ousting three United Russia governors. In a world where freedom of expression is fine up until the point where it infringes on Kremlin control, this was all unacceptable. Navalny's opposition movement was powered by online platforms, from Telegram to Twitter, and now it was producing tangible offline results. 

"Now the question for Putin becomes, is the internet manageable?" Partlett said.

The Kremlin cracked down hard. An online libel law was enacted last December, allowing sites to be blocked and people to be jailed for "defaming" public figures. Specific activists and journalists have been targeted: one journalist was jailed for 25 days for retweeting a photo that carried the date and time of a planned protest, while a video of police violently interrogating blogger Gennady Shulga was leaked by the police themselves, Shulga said, "to show people what the authorities can do." 

Navalny's treatment played out in front of the world. He was poisoned in an airport in August 2020, then flown to Berlin, where he recuperated. After returning to Russia, he was immediately imprisoned. Meanwhile, Putin amended the constitution in April to allow him to rule as president until 2036. 

Alexei Navalny, the face of Russia's liberal opposition, is currently jailed in Russia. 

Dmitry Serebryakov/Getty

Taking on big tech

Litreev talks about his exploits like a nimble David outmaneuvering a lumbering, sluggish Goliath. He knows the battle will be perilous but expects he and his fellow activists will ultimately prevail. 

"The level of expertise and level of professionalism on the government side is much lower than our side," he said.

Litreev points to a spat between Twitter and Kremlin as evidence. In March, Roskomnadzor demanded Twitter take down thousands of tweets dating back to 2017 that encouraged illegal activity -- which includes child porn, drug markets and, of course, news stories related to opposition candidates. To motivate Twitter to fulfill the request, the telecoms regulator throttled Twitter's speed for months. 

But, in a flashback to the Roskomnadzor inadvertently blocking Google amid a clumsy attempt to ban Telegram, sites like Reddit.com and Microsoft.com went down too. People realized that authorities had targeted the "t.co" link-shortening formation Twitter uses, which clobbered any website that ended with the letter "t."

It was a conspicuous fumble on the part of Roskomnadzor, but authorities did manage to isolate and slow down Twitter. The initial missteps masked the use of a concerning new suite of powers that had been signed into law in 2019, called "the sovereign internet," or RuNet. 

The law requires ISPs to connect a new range of state hardware to internet exchange points. These "big red boxes" all direct to a control center in Moscow and allow the Kremlin to manage the flow of traffic from one region of the country to another. The system has been called a "digital Iron Curtain," akin to China's Great Firewall that separates its internet from the rest of the world. 

Soldatov says this comparison is inaccurate. The Kremlin isn't interested in isolating itself from the rest of the internet, he says, since that would prove economically ruinous. Rather, it's a tool to control the flow of information from one region of the country to the next.

"The sovereign internet was never about the West. It's about what's going on inside the country," he said. "The most sensitive content is generated inside the country."

Moscovites protesting the jailing of Navalny in April.

Anadolu Agency/Getty

Roskomnadzor was able to pair the new sovereign internet hardware with existing data surveillance technology to selectively slow Twitter traffic. In the future, the Kremlin could use the same technology to, for example, throttle certain apps to prevent livestreams from a protest in Moscow from reaching other parts of the country. 

It was the government's first known experiment with its newest online tools -- and it worked.

Twitter has removed over 6,000 tweets, according to Roskomnadzor. In the months since, Russian authorities have demanded Facebook take down content, fined Google $81,000 for not taking down content, and told Facebook and Twitter to store all data of Russian users within the country. On Aug. 26, Twitter and Facebook were both fined for not storing such data quickly enough.

Facebook, Google and Twitter declined to comment. Roskomnadzor was contacted but didn't respond. 

Just as the Kremlin pressures Facebook, Google and Twitter, it fosters local substitutes like RuTube, a YouTube alternative owned by the state gas company. Law requires Android phones to come preloaded with 16 Russian-made apps, including the VK social media app and the Yandex search engine, while Apple is required to prompt Russians to download the apps during the setup process of new iPhones. It's part of a plan meant to better allow authorities to control online platforms so that anti-Kremlin content can't go viral. 

"The tools the Russian government uses are evolving with time. They are much more advanced if we compare them to, say, 2018," Litreev acknowledged. "But modern problems require modern solutions." 

The modern problems

Litreev's latest project is Solar Labs, a decentralized VPN that's based on blockchain and incentivized with cryptocurrency. The Solar Labs platform will allow people around the world to host their own VPN servers, for which they'll be paid with Solar Labs cryptocurrency tokens. If enough people from a variety of countries host their own VPN servers, it'll be impossible for all servers to be taken down at once. 

"Even if the government will do whatever it takes to block our service, they will not succeed unless they just shut the whole internet for the whole country," he said. Solar Labs is designed to be useful not just for Russians, but also Iranians, Chinese and Belarussians, all of whom face strict internet censorship. 

Litreev says the Kremlin's crackdowns on activists, journalists and dissidents are acts of hysteria. The more extreme the measure, the more desperation it reflects. 

And the measures have gotten extreme. It's not just in Russia, either. In May, Belarus' ruler, who's closely aligned with Putin, used military force to ground a RyanAir plane midflight to detain a dissident journalist. The whole region's rules are being rewritten.

Litreev wants to go home to see old faces and places, but says people like him need to work to create a safe Russia. He hopes that Solar Labs' VPN, which launches in September, will be part of that process. Meanwhile, Litreev feels safe in Estonia -- though he makes sure any flights he takes avoid both Russian and Belarusian airspace. 

Soldatov, living in London, is less hopeful. He said he was optimistic five years ago, when he co-authored The Red Web, but that the events since then have sapped his confidence.

"We use this word, 'unprecedented,'" he said. "The problem when something is unprecedented is you cannot calculate your risks, because you do not know where they are going to stop." 

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