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In the year of our Lord 2024, is there any topic at all that cant become fodder for the culture wars? Apparently not. Case in point: The dumb-as-hell fracas thats broken out on X about the cryptographic integrity of two messaging apps, Telegram and Signal. The debate boils down to which apps technical standards are more likely to protect user privacya 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 sides 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 NPRs left-wing politics, conservatives began gunning for the broadcasters 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 youre wondering, my own politics are centrist. I find there is excellent reportingand plenty of bias and bad stuff, tooto be found in publications across the political spectrum. (And as someone who toils in media, Ill add I get frustrated with the lefts refusal to acknowledge its own bias. While someone at Fox News is likely to say Yeah, were right wingso what? the liberal high priests at the New York Times or Columbia Journalism School will tell you, We dont have an agenda. We perform JOURNALISM.) But thats getting beyond the topic at hand, which is whether the NPR presidents slight involvement with Signal should lead us to distrust the app. The short answer is: Thats 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 Ive metwho dont strike me as raging leftistsis that Signals tech is first-rate. It also doesnt 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 Zuckerbergs WhatsApp has this!) 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.

An earlier version of this newsletter incorrectly stated Telegram has servers in Russia.

Jeff John Roberts jeff.roberts@fortune.com @jeffjohnroberts

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Elon Musk and the Signal vs. Telegram debate - Fortune