The original Telegram channel has expanded into a web of accounts for different locations, including specific pages made for individual Russian cities. There's also an English-language website, which states it is owned by the people who run the Telegram channels. Channels are not fully encrypted, end-to-end. All communications on a Telegram channel can be seen by anyone on the channel and are also visible to Telegram. Telegram may be asked by a government to hand over the communications from a channel. Telegram has a history of standing up to Russian government requests for data, but how comfortable you are relying on that history to predict future behavior is up to you. Because Telegram has this data, it may also be stolen by hackers or leaked by an internal employee. "Your messages about the movement of the enemy through the official chatbot … bring new trophies every day," the government agency tweeted. "And that set off kind of a battle royale for control of the platform that Durov eventually lost," said Nathalie Maréchal of the Washington advocacy group Ranking Digital Rights. Although some channels have been removed, the curation process is considered opaque and insufficient by analysts.
from id
