At the start of 2018, the company attempted to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which would enable it to enable payments (and earn the cash that comes from doing so). The initial signals were promising, especially given Telegramโs user base is already fairly crypto-savvy. It raised an initial tranche of cash โ worth more than a billion dollars โ to help develop the coin before opening sales to the public. Unfortunately, third-party sales of coins bought in those initial fundraising rounds raised the ire of the SEC, which brought the hammer down on the whole operation. In 2020, officials ordered Telegram to pay a fine of $18.5 million and hand back much of the cash that it had raised. Unlike Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter, which run very public anti-disinformation programs, Brooking said: "Telegram is famously lax or absent in its content moderation policy." Despite Telegram's origins, its approach to users' security has privacy advocates worried. "And that set off kind of a battle royale for control of the platform that Durov eventually lost," said Nathalie Marรฉchal of the Washington advocacy group Ranking Digital Rights. Groups are also not fully encrypted, end-to-end. This includes private groups. Private groups cannot be seen by other Telegram users, but Telegram itself can see the groups and all of the communications that you have in them. All of the same risks and warnings about channels can be applied to groups.
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