In response to renewed scrutiny of platform policies following recent instances of political unrest in the United States, the widely-used messaging application Telegram has initiated efforts to curtail a network of organized neo-Nazi and white supremacist accounts that had become active on the service.

Telegram has verified to TechCrunch that it has removed a number of channels in the past day, citing concerns regarding incitement to violence within those accounts.

“Our Terms of Service explicitly prohibit public appeals for violence,” explained Telegram spokesperson Mike Ravdonikas to TechCrunch. “…Over the last 24 hours, we have blocked numerous public channels that disseminated calls to violence to their thousands of subscribers.”

When questioned about whether these removals were connected to the recent violent events at the U.S. Capitol, Ravdonikas stated that Telegram will “review all submitted reports” and that the company is “carefully monitoring the current situation.”

The company also confirmed that several accounts previously identified by TechCrunch as promoting white supremacist ideologies, Nazi symbols, and other forms of far-right extremism were included in this latest enforcement action, which is still ongoing. As of Wednesday, some of the blocked channels remained accessible through Telegram’s web interface.

One of the groups that was removed expressed dismay over Telegram’s bans on Tuesday, sharing a post featuring a Nazi flag and the statement “you can’t kill an idea.” This channel had previously amassed over 10,000 followers.

Numerous extremist channels began advertising alternative accounts on Tuesday, directing their subscribers to a variety of other groups where they could continue their activities. Other channels sympathetic to these views documented the bans as they occurred, posting screenshots illustrating violations of Telegram’s terms of service.

The collection of far-right accounts that Telegram closed were generally not focused on conventional U.S. political discourse or theories surrounding former President Trump. Certain channels even dismissed the beliefs of QAnon as a distraction, while many openly advocated for racial purity through various strategies, including guidance drawn from texts on guerrilla warfare and other materials provided to users via Telegram’s file hosting feature. One account identified itself as “The Neo-Nazi Accelerationists your girlfriend told you not to worry about.”

Telegram’s recent removals appear to be a result of efforts by Gwen Snyder, an anti-fascist activist, who mobilized Twitter users in a “mass-reporting campaign” following the violent intrusion at the U.S. Capitol.

“For years, we have been tracking these Nazi Terrorgram channels and reporting egregious, explicit calls to racist violence and insurrection, and Telegram took no action,” Snyder told TechCrunch, adding that the recent reporting campaign aimed to pressure the company into responding.

“It was successful, and Telegram is finally dismantling the network of Nazi channels that have spent months and years openly attempting to incite the kind of terror we witnessed in D.C.”

Many extremist Telegram channels attributed the takedowns to Snyder, resulting in a targeted doxxing campaign that has circulated her home address. One channel advocating for her harm displayed an image of Snyder’s face with a graphic injury, while another included her address, screenshots of her Twitter posts, and the message “You know what to do.”

Snyder reported that she heard banging on her door Tuesday night. “My address is circulating on those channels with people saying I should be shot and assaulted for this, and all it takes is one person to act.”

As President Trump has been suspended from many major platforms and restrictions have increased on pro-Trump theories like QAnon and the Stop the Steal movement, social media users have migrated to platforms that continue to allow the spread of extremist content.

Parler, a social network promoted by many supporters of former President Trump as a politically-aligned alternative to mainstream social media, has been prominent among these platforms. However, with Parler taken offline after Amazon suspended its web hosting services and Apple and Google removed it from their app stores, some users have turned to more private options where violent extremism persists, including Telegram.

Apple and Google did not respond to inquiries regarding Telegram’s status and whether they have issued any warnings to the messaging app in the past week.

Telegram has experienced significant growth this month, gaining 25 million new users within 72 hours. While this timing coincides with some U.S. social media users expressing dissatisfaction with mainstream platforms, the increase was largely driven by viral misinformation concerning changes to WhatsApp’s data sharing policies with Facebook, a company already known for privacy concerns.

“People no longer wish to trade their privacy for free services,” Telegram founder Pavel Durov stated in a post to his Telegram channel on Tuesday. “They no longer want to be controlled by tech monopolies that appear to believe they can act with impunity simply because their apps have a large user base.”