It is estimated that the bot contains data from 26 million Ukrainians registered in the Diia application. Volodymyr Flents, the chairman of the public organization “Electronic Democracy”, announced on 11 May 2020 that a Telegram bot appeared on the Web, which sold the personal data of Ukrainian citizens. The group was banned after reports from users and media, although no public statement was made. The company has a verified channel called “Stop Child Abuse”, where daily statistics on the number of groups and channels banned for sharing illegal materials are posted. Twelve days later, Telegram told its users that the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630 against online disinformation, which was about to be approved, would end freedom of speech in the country. Throughout 2020, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used groups and channels to dox Iraqi and Iranian citizens, while sharing propagandistic posts on the platform.
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Far-right and white supremacist communities on Telegram have spread videos of the Christchurch and Halle shootings in groups and channels after the original livestreams were taken down by Twitch. The company only partially fulfilled a court request for personal data on two antisemitic Telegram groups, which authorities considered an intentional lack of cooperation. After the 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar, the junta used Telegram channels to spread propaganda and organize misinformation campaigns against pro-democracy groups. In 2023, Saudi Arabia’s Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology (Etidal) reported that in collaboration with Telegram, over 59 million pieces of extremist content had been removed from the platform since 2022. Beginning in December 2016, Telegram began publishing daily moderation statistics regarding terror-related content in an official channel named @ISISwatch.
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Ads from Telegram’s “Sponsored Messages” platform began to appear in channels with more than 1000 followers in October 2021. For users who signed in from the European Economic Area (EEA) or United Kingdom, the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) are supported by storing data only on servers in the Netherlands, and designating a London-based company as their responsible data controller. Premium users get access to additional settings, like instant chat translation, and the ability to restrict who can send them text and voice messages. Similar to other social platforms, Telegram users can post stories, a type of short-form content.
Any user can also send a message to a special “Saved Messages” chat as a form of bookmarking them. Sticker packs are made by Telegram designers as well as regular users and can be shared via links. Reactions can be used to respond to a message with emoji, with Premium users having access to more reaction choices and the ability to leave more reactions per message. As users can be logged into many devices at once, starting to type a message on one of them will create a “cloud draft” that syncs with others, so typing can be started on a phone and finished on a laptop, for example.
However, deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation Mykhailo Fedorov denied any data from the app being leaked. In August 2024, journalist Ko Narin of the Hankyoreh exposed Telegram chats of teenagers who used generative AI to deepfake images of their classmates and teachers for porn. The President of North Macedonia Stevo Pendarovski, along with the Prime Minister of North Macedonia Zoran Zaev, demanded an immediate reaction from Telegram and threatened to completely restrict access to the app in the country if no actions were taken. Along with the shared photographs, anonymous accounts shared private information of the women, including phone numbers and social media profiles, encouraging members of the group to contact the women and ask for sexual favors. British far-right publication TR.news, following multiple deplatformings, launched a Telegram channel to spread its posts and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported that Irish far-right groups grew substantially between 2019 and 2020.
Telegram has been blocked temporarily or permanently by some governments including Iran, China, Brazil, and Pakistan. Regarding Telegram, the report cites its lack of end-to-end encryption by default, its Russian origins and third-party open source intelligence as major critical points. In September 2021, a Russian researcher published details about a bug with the self-destruct feature that allowed the user to recover deleted photos from their own device.
Telegram messages in private chats can be edited up to 48 hours after they were sent with an “edited” icon appearing to reflect changes, as well as deleted for both sides without a trace. In September 2015, Telegram announced that the app had 60 million active users and delivered 12 billion daily messages. The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine enforced the restrictions following evidence reported to them by Kyrylo Budanov, showing Russia’s ability to access messages and user data on the platform. They criticized how, unless modified first, the default general security model stores all contacts, messages and media together with their decryption keys on its servers continuously; and that it does not enable end-to-end encryption for messages by default. Telegram responded to the BBC’s reporting, stating that Telegram “proactively moderates harmful content on its platform including child abuse material”, and that its moderation is “within industry standards and constantly improving”.
- Specific users can be tagged in the group by adding @username to a message, where “username” is that particular user’s username.
- In March 2025, Pavel Durov announced that Telegram surpassed 1 billion monthly active users.
- The interface shows users a visual representation of their storage usage and also lets them sort their cached media by size to clear specific items.
- Whenever a new device successfully logs in to a user’s account, a special service notification is sent and a login alert is displayed in the chat list of their other devices.
- It features a website widget that can be embedded into websites, allowing users to sign into a third party website with their Telegram account.
The Devices submenu shows all of the active devices on a user’s account and allows them to remotely log out from those devices. Similarly, users can hide their phone number and profile photo from people based on categories such as Non-Contacts or by adding exceptions. Whenever a new device successfully logs in to a user’s account, a special service notification is sent and a login alert is displayed in the chat list of their other devices. Once launched, a group voice chat will remain active and open to all group members until an admin specifically closes it.
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The Telegram team responded that the flaw does not affect message security and that “a future patch would address the concern”. Nevertheless, they said they saw “no reason why Telegram should use a less secure encryption scheme when more secure (and at least as efficient) solutions exist”. In December 2015, two researchers from Aarhus University published a report in which they demonstrated that MTProto 1.0 did not achieve indistinguishability under chosen-ciphertext attack (IND-CCA) or authenticated encryption. The EFF said that the results “should not be read as endorsements of individual tools or guarantees of their security”, and that they were merely indications that the projects were “on the right track”.
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In a later blog post, Durov directly stated that the block was a result of pressure from Google and Apple as refusal to comply with their policies would result “in an immediate shutdown of Telegram for millions of users”. The messages were considered vulgar, racist, and homophobic, with members of the chat discussing how they would use the media to target potential political opponents. Third parties were asked to break the service’s cryptography and disclose the information contained within a secret chat between two computer-controlled users. In July 2024, ESET reported a vulnerability allowed malicious files being sent to users masked in multimedia.
- It does not disclose where it rents offices or which legal entities it uses to rent them, citing the need to “shelter the team from unnecessary influence” and protect users from governmental data requests.
- The attack relied on people downloading a malware-infected file from any source, at which point it would replace Telegram files on the device and ‘clone’ session data.
- Premium users get access to additional settings, like instant chat translation, and the ability to restrict who can send them text and voice messages.
- In late 2020, Durov announced that the company was working on its own ad platform, and would integrate non-targeted ads in public one-to-many channels, that already were selling and displaying ads in the form of regular messages.
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Auto download settings can also be applied based on chat type such as group, channel or private. Telegram clients can turn off media autoplay and automatic downloads for both WiFi and mobile data, adjusting them for media type and size. In the Privacy and Security submenu of Settings, users have the option to hide their “Last Seen” status, which reflects the last time the user opened a Telegram app.
On 30 March 2020, an Elasticsearch database holding 42 million records containing user IDs and phone numbers of Iranian users was exposed online without a password. The organization was favorable to Telegram’s secure chats and partially free code but criticized the mandatory transfer of contact data to Telegram’s servers and the lack of an imprint or address on the service’s website. Since July 2016, Line has also applied end-to-end encryption to all of its messages by default, though it has also been criticized for being susceptible to replay attacks and the lack of forward secrecy between clients. When the user assigns a local password in the desktop application, data is also locally encrypted. Pavel Durov has argued that this is because it helps to avoid third-party unsecured backups, and to allow users to access messages and files from any device. The most common mode of fraud involves scammers sending messages to unsuspecting users, offering part-time online jobs which comprise a series of tasks.
According to press reports, prior to the bonds placement, Durov had rejected an investment offer for a 5–10% stake in the company as well as several undisclosed ones, valuing the company in a $30–40 billion range. A day later, the Mubadala Investment Company stated that Russia’s sovereign wealth fund participated in its deal undisclosed through the Russia-UAE joint investment platform to buy convertible bonds. The funding was required to cover the debts amounting to $625.7 million, including $433 million to investors who bought futures for Gram tokens in 2018 and included purchasers such as David Yakobashvili. The company was initially supported by founding CEO Pavel Durov’s personal funds after the sale of his stake in VK. In addition, Telegram offers functions for making payments directly within the platform, alongside an external service such as Stripe.
Telegram’s internal reporting system has an option to report content that contains child abuse, including specific messages in groups and channels. Following the launch of Stars, Telegram released several updates to their functionality, such as allowing Stars to be used to https://chickenroadapp.in/ unlock media in channels or to buy gifts for other users. In late 2020, Durov announced that the company was working on its own ad platform, and would integrate non-targeted ads in public one-to-many channels, that already were selling and displaying ads in the form of regular messages. Such bots are used, among other things, to emulate and play old games in the app and inform users about vaccine availability for COVID-19.
The desktop clients, excluding the macOS client, do not feature options for end-to-end encrypted messages. This partially addresses the concern about the lack of scrutiny while confirming the formal security of the protocol’s latest version. In December 2020, a study titled “Automated Symbolic Verification of Telegram’s MTProto 2.0″ was published, confirming the security of the updated MTProto 2.0 and reviewing it while pointing out several theoretical vulnerabilities. Criticisms were also aimed at Telegram’s use of a custom-designed encryption protocol.
When typing in an emoji, the user is offered to send the respective sticker instead. The gateway is integrated with a bot, which is linked with the developer’s specific website domain. The gateway sends the user’s Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while the user’s phone number remains hidden. Bots power Telegram’s gaming platform, which utilizes HTML5, so games are loaded on-demand as needed, like ordinary webpages.
In March 2021, Telegram launched a bonds offering to cover the debt and fund further growth of the app. The company agreed to pay an $18.5 million penalty and return $1.22 billion to Gram purchasers. In January and February 2018, the company ran a private sale of futures contracts for Grams, raising around $1.7 billion. In June 2024, Telegram launched Telegram Stars to facilitate in-app purchases of digital goods and services, in compliance with policies from the App Store and Play Store. Durov said the bond sale “will further solidify our position as an independent platform that is able to challenge the ‘Goliaths’ of our industry”.
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A distinctive feature of this version is the ability to view channels/groups on a specific topic without censorship, which cannot be viewed from an app distributed from Google Play or the Apple Store due to their policies.citation needed For encrypted chats (branded as Secret Chats), Telegram uses a custom-built symmetric encryption scheme called MTProto. In October 2024, Telegram launched a verification platform, called Telegram Gateway, allowing third-party services to authenticate their users by sending verification codes via Telegram. In December 2020, Telegram launched a Bugs and Suggestions platform, where users can submit bug reports and suggestion cards for new features. Telegraph natively supports Instant View, a feature which lets users read full articles in the chat with no load time and without opening an external browser. These collectible gifts are registered on the TON blockchain as a form of NFT and can then be traded or sold both on the Telegram platform via the in-app Gift Marketplace or via outside platforms and marketplaces.