I heard that in USA Telegram is used mostly by conservatives, trans-haters and drug dealers. But in Russia where I was born and where I have been living until the war, Telegram was a single source of alternative news and the main tool for opposition to putin. I had a talk with an Iranian guy recently and he told me the same: in Iran Telegram is the only source of non-state-propaganda news.
I do not care that Durov is just a billionaire who makes money on the trend of privacy. But I remember how Telegram successfully fought against attempt of blocking in Russia in 2018 by providing regular updates and using different techniques to avoid blocking. An attack on Telegram for me is an attack on the latest opposition to putin, khamenei, lukashenko and others.
Telegram successfully fought against attempt of blocking in Russia in 2018 by providing regular updates and using different techniques to avoid blocking.
I too heard Russia claimed they could not block it. Could be deliberate theatre to bolster its reputation.
It may not be just the Kremlin. I've had several cases where I wrote about something in a Telegram chat, stuff I had never talked about before, and in a matter of seconds started seeing related ads on Facebook.
Alternatively, it could be the keyboard leaking all text, or I could have some other spyware, but I've only had that happen to me between Telegram and Facebook.
Then again, Telegram group chats are unencrypted, and personal chats are unencrypted by default.
lmao. It's barely encrypted and what little of it that is (one-to-one DMs) have never been audited in a way where Telegram haven't just either ignored the results or moved the goalposts.
I have no idea what's going on with all of this but the news said that he was arrested for child pornography, so in my opinion if there was a hundred other things that he did right this one bad thing out does them all if that is what he did.
The French government said that Telegram is being used to distribute illegal material like child pornography. He is not accused of distributing it himself.
He's accused of tolerating such distribution even after being alerted of the fact so, yes, he's accused of distributing it. For an online platform "we didn't know about it because we don't moderate proactively" is a valid defence, "authorities told us about it but we didn't feel like doing anything about it because can't be bothered / frozen peaches" isn't.