The company has updated its FAQ page to say that private chats are no longer shielded from moderation.
Telegram has quietly removed language from its FAQ page that said private chats were protected from moderation requests. The change comes nearly two weeks after its CEO, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France for allegedly allowing “criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.”
Earlier today, Durov issued his first public statement since his arrest, promising to moderate content more on the platform, a noticeable change in tone after the company initially said he had “nothing to hide.”
“Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform,” he wrote in the statement shared on Thursday. “That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.”
Translation: Durov is completely compromised and will do whatever NATO tells him to do. Do not trust in the security of Telegram, which frankly was never that good to begin with. And do not trust anything else even remotely connected to the company or Durov personally.
It is a joke and always was. Only advantage was that it wasn't based in the US and wasn't censorious (but they have servers there and in every other shitty spying country so dubious advantage really.)
I'm in a bunch of chatrooms that are bridged across platforms with bots and all the worst spam always came from telegram.
To be fair, end to end encryption, especially if you want to protect metadata as much as possible, is probably pretty hard to scale to tens of thousands of members which is common on telegram. But they already had a division between groups and channels, so idk