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On 26 April 2023, Telegram was temporarily suspended in Brazil and fined R$1 million (2023) (US$185,528.76) per day for not complying with a Federal Police investigation into neo-Nazi activities on the platform. After the 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar, the junta used Telegram channels to spread propaganda and organize misinformation campaigns against pro-democracy groups. Beginning in December 2016, Telegram began publishing daily moderation statistics regarding terror-related content in an official channel named @ISISwatch. In France, initial investigations of a terrorist act revealed the perpetrators used Telegram to communicate, though follow-up research suggested that the extent of the app’s use was “unclear”. ISIS has used Telegram for recruiting attempts with some cells recommending the app to their followers. Moldovan president Maia Sandu denounced that Telegram refused any collaboration with the Moldovan state authorities against illegal activities taking place in its platform such as vote buying.

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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. 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. 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”. The group was banned after reports from users and media, although no public statement was made.

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In April 2025, Telegram launched secure group calls with end-to-end encryption by using blockchain-like encryption technology. According to Telegram, there is a neural network working to learn various technical parameters about a call to provide better quality of service for future uses. Channel owners are able to use Telegram to create giveaways, randomly awarding channel members with prizes such as Telegram Premium subscriptions to their followers, based on certain criteria. Channels offer detailed statistics on view counts, user growth and interactions, also visible only to admins.

Certain approved bots are also able to integrate into the attachment menu, making them accessible in any chat. In the same menu, users can restrict the circle of people who can call them or invite them to groups and channels, while Premium users also have the option to restrict who can send them text and voice messages. In channels, users can start a livestream, that is able to integrate with third-party apps such as OBS Studio and XSplit. Since 2017, Telegram users have been able to initiate one-on-one calls in private chats. Users can freely join public chats and find them using the in-app search function, while private chats require an invitation. Groups are large multi-user chats that support up to 200,000 members and can be public or private.

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On 9 June 2019, The Intercept released leaked Telegram messages exchanged between current Brazilian Minister of Justice and former judge Sérgio Moro and federal prosecutors. Login SMS messages are known to have been intercepted in Iran, Russia and Germany, possibly in coordination with phone or telecom companies. In April 2016, several Russian opposition members’ accounts were hijacked by intercepting the SMS messages used for login authorization. MTProto 2.0 is seen by qualified cryptographers as a vast improvement to Telegram’s security. The Telegram team responded that the flaw does not affect message security and that “a future patch would address the concern”.

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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. In July 2024, ESET reported a vulnerability allowed malicious files being sent to users masked in multimedia. 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. 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.

  • The company only partially fulfilled a court request for personal data on two antisemitic Telegram groups, which authorities considered an intentional lack of cooperation.
  • Any Telegram content is synced between the user’s logged-in devices automatically through cloud storage, except for device-specific secret chats.
  • 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.
  • The company’s founder has said he wants the app to have an anti-censorship tool for Iran and China similar to the app’s role in fighting censorship in Russia.
  • The accounts were extracted from not Telegram but an unofficial version of Telegram, in what appears to be a possibly government-sanctioned fork.

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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Groups are large multi-user chats that support up to 200,000 members and can be public or private.
  • An investigation published in August 2024 by the BBC showed that Telegram has not responded to requests to join the US–based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), nor from the UK–based Internet Watch Foundation, both non–profit NGOs.
  • This partially addresses the concern about the lack of scrutiny while confirming the formal security of the protocol’s latest version.

Premium users have the ability to set any chat folder as the default screen in the app while regular users will always see the full chat list when first opening the app. Messages from private chats can be forwarded, with an option to hide the original sender’s identity or to hide captions from media messages. Users have the option to delete messages and whole chats for both themself and other participants. Any Telegram content is synced between the user’s logged-in devices automatically through cloud storage, except for device-specific secret chats. In February 2016, Telegram announced that it had 100 million monthly active users, with 350,000 new users signing up every day, delivering 15 billion messages daily. Telegram also has social networking features, allowing users to post stories, create large public groups with up to 200,000 members, or share one-way updates to unlimited audiences in so-called channels.

As of March 2025,update Telegram has more than 1 billion monthly active users, with India as the country with the most users. The company’s founder has said he wants the app to have an anti-censorship tool for Iran and China similar to the app’s role in fighting censorship in Russia. All issues were patched before the paper’s publication with a security bounty paid out to the researchers.

The accounts were extracted from not Telegram but an unofficial version of Telegram, in what appears to be a possibly government-sanctioned fork. Security company Group-IB suggested SS7 mobile signalling protocol weaknesses, illegal usage of surveillance equipment, or telecom insider attacks. The Telegram team tweeted that it was either because the user had malware or they were not using two-step verification.

By March 2018, that number had doubled, with Telegram reaching 200 million monthly active users. On 24 March 2014, Telegram announced that it had reached 35 million monthly users and 15 million daily active users. The company says this is done “to protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption”. 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.

We process your data to deliver content or advertisements and measure the delivery of such content or advertisements to extract insights about our website. The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. On 24 August 2024, Pavel Durov, who is both a French and UAE citizen, was arrested in France by French authorities. The post included a screenshot showing an internal email sent by the App Store to developers, demanding the takedown of content related to Navalny. Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh called the block and the deletion of the tactical voting app from app stores “censorship … imposed by private companies”.

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. In June 2021, an update introduced a new bot menu where users can browse and send commands while in a chat with a bot.

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The blocking of the main Smart Voting bot was criticized by allies of Alexei Navalny, a Kremlin critic and former opposition leader. Hundreds of pages of a group chat between Rosselló and members of his staff were leaked. Andriy Kovalenko, head of the security council’s centre on countering disinformation, clarified that the ban was limited to official devices and did not extend to personal phones. Telegram has been blocked temporarily or permanently by some governments including Iran, China, Brazil, and Pakistan.

Users can use Telegram’s transparency bot to check how many legal requests from their country it has processed. But according to Pavel, Telegram disclosed data for 203 legal requests from the Brazilian government in January to September 2024 and 6,992 legal requests from India, its largest market, during that period. Its data centers are spread across a complex corporate structure of shell companies in various jurisdictions to avoid compliance with government subpoenas. Telegram is registered as a company in the British Virgin Islands and as an LLC in Dubai. It was the most downloaded app worldwide in January 2021, with 1 billion downloads globally as of late August 2021. Its servers are distributed worldwide with several data centers, and its headquarters are in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

People can use Internet Of Things (IoT) services with two-way interaction via IFTTT implemented within Telegram. Bots power Telegram’s gaming platform, which utilizes HTML5, so games are loaded on-demand as needed, like ordinary webpages. When a user chooses to hide their profile photo, they can set an alternative “Public Profile Picture” that will be shown instead. Hiding the status obfuscates the exact time the user was online and hides the statuses of other people respectively. By default, logging into Telegram requires either an SMS message sent to the registered number or a code message sent to one of the active sessions on another device.

Upon signing up, messages sent and received by the user are tied to their number and a custom username, not the device. To use Telegram, a user must sign up with their phone number or an anonymous +888 number purchased from the Fragment blockchain platform. Telegram then gained over 70 million new users as a result of an outage which affected Facebook and its affiliates on 5 October 2021. Join the millions of users who have already installed 4K Video Downloader! He focuses on producing content that is both accurate and accessible for diverse audiences.

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Both in Secret and regular chats, messages can self-destruct after they are read, disappearing for all parties after a period set by the user, ranging from 1 day to 1 year. 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. Telegram allows groups, bots and channels with a verified social media or Wikipedia page to be verified, but not individual user accounts. In September 2015, Telegram announced that the app had 60 million active users and delivered 12 billion daily messages. In December 2014, Telegram announced that it had 50 million active users, generating 1 billion daily messages, and that it had 1 million new users signing up on its service every week, traffic doubled in five months with 2 billion daily messages. It allows users to exchange messages, share media and files, and hold private and group voice or video calls as well as public livestreams.

When an online service requires such identification documents and verification, it forwards the information to the platform with the user’s permission. 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. In October 2024, Telegram launched Gifts, a type of virtual cosmetic item that users can purchase and send to each other in the app using Telegram Stars. In August 2022, Telegram launched an emoji platform where users could upload their own custom emoji, either in animated or static versions.

When an author adds links to YouTube, Vimeo, or Twitter, the service allows you to embed their content directly in the article. In July 2025, Telegram partnered with the rapper and media figure Snoop Dogg to release a set of limited edition collectible gifts alongside his music video “Gifts”. As of 2023, Telegram Premium can be acquired via in-app purchases facilitated by Apple and Google, directly via Telegram’s @PremiumBot, or with cryptocurrency on the Fragment platform. They were removed in 2024, with Durov saying that they had had “issues with bots and scammers”.

In March 2025, Pavel Durov announced that Telegram surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. In July 2023, Telegram surpassed 800 million monthly active users, later reaching 900 million in March 2024 and 950 million in July 2024. On 19 June 2022, Telegram announced that it had reached 700 million monthly active users. On 8 January 2021, Pavel announced in a blog post that Telegram had reached “about 500 million” monthly active users. On 24 April 2020, Telegram announced that it had reached 400 million monthly active users. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, as of October 2019, Telegram had 300 million monthly active users worldwide.

The gateway sends users’ Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while users’ phone number remains hidden. It features a website widget that could be embedded into websites, allowing users to sign into a third party website with their Telegram account. In February 2018, Telegram launched their social login feature to its users, named Telegram Login.