Love is love.

I won’t go into the specific channels as to not promote them or what they do but we can talk about one known example, which is how Bellingcat got to the FSB officers responsible for the poisoning of Navalny via their mobile phone call logs and airline ticket data. They used the two highly popular bots called H****a and the E** ** G**, which allow to get everything known to the government and other social networks on every citizen of Russia for about $1 to $5. They use the Telegram API and have been there for years. How do you moderate that? You don’t. You take it down as the illegal, privacy-violating, and doxing-enabling content that it is.

Edit: “Censored” the names of the bots, as I still don’t want to make them even easier to find.

It’s a street, not a changing booth. Also, I’m familiar with every charge against Durov and I personally have seen the illegal content I talked about. If it’s so easily accessible to the public and persists for years, it has nothing to do with privacy and there is no moderation - though his words also underscore the latter.

It has nothing to do with privacy. Telegram is an old-school social network in that it doesn’t even require that you register to view the content pages. It’s also a social network taken to the extreme of free speech absolutism in that it doesn’t mind people talking openly about every kind of crime and their use of its tools to make it easier to obtain the related services. All that with no encryption at all.