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Thoughts from the CEO of Telegram
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Only on Telegram could independent developers pull this off. The Mini App platform gives them absolute freedom — and the results are wild.
P. S. I had zero involvement or even knowledge about this before it launched. Respect to the creators!
Today, the European Union nearly banned your right to privacy. It was set to vote on a law that would force apps to scan every private message, turning everyone’s phone into a spying tool.
France led the push for this authoritarian law. Both former and current Interior Ministers, Bruno Retailleau and Laurent Nuñez, supported it. Last March, they declared that police should see French citizens’ private messages (more info here). The Republicans and Macron’s Renaissance group voted for it.
Such measures are supposed to “fight crime”, but their real target is regular people. It wouldn’t stop criminals — they could just use VPNs or special websites to hide. Officials’ and police messages wouldn’t be scanned either, since the law conveniently exempts them from surveillance. Only YOU — ordinary citizens — would face the danger of your private messages and photos being compromised.
Today, we defended privacy: Germany’s sudden stand saved our rights. But freedoms are still threatened. While French leaders push for total access to private messages, the basic rights of French people — and all Europeans — remain in danger.
The new Telegram update is here — with 12 features added in one month:
All demos and details
telegram.org/blog/comments-in-video-chats-threads-for-bots
I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating.
Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers.
What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.
Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).
Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.
A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast — while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms — and allowed them to be taken away.
We’ve been fed a lie.
We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech.
By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.
So no, I’m not going to celebrate today. I’m running out of time. We are running out of time.
After reviewing the channels flagged by French (and Moldovan) authorities, we identified a few that clearly violated our rules and removed them. The intermediary then informed me that, in exchange for this cooperation, French intelligence would “say good things” about me to the judge who had ordered my arrest in August last year.
This was unacceptable on several levels. If the agency did in fact approach the judge — it constituted an attempt to interfere in the judicial process. If it did not, and merely claimed to have done so, then it was exploiting my legal situation in France to influence political developments in Eastern Europe — a pattern we have also observed in Romania
Shortly thereafter, the Telegram team received a second list of so-called “problematic” Moldovan channels. Unlike the first, nearly all of these channels were legitimate and fully compliant with our rules. Their only commonality was that they voiced political positions disliked by the French and Moldovan governments.
We refused to act on this request.
Telegram is committed to freedom of speech and will not remove content for political reasons. I will continue to expose every attempt to pressure Telegram into censoring our platform. Stay tuned.
Growth in the last 30 days
@charliekirk’s death is an assault on free speech. He fought for open debate, and enemies of truth hated him for it.
Free expression is under attack worldwide. Once free speech is lost, every other freedom soon follows. We must continue Charlie’s mission to defend it
A year later, the ‘criminal investigation’ against me is still struggling to find anything that I or Telegram did wrong. Our moderation practices align with industry standards, and Telegram has always responded to every legally binding request from France.
Ironically, I was arrested due to the French police’s own mistake: before August 2024, they ignored French and EU laws and hadn’t sent any of their queries to Telegram via the required legal process. They could have learned the correct procedure simply by googling it or asking.
One year after this strange arrest, I still have to return to France every 14 days, with no appeal date in sight. Sadly, the only outcome of my arrest so far has been massive damage to France’s image as a free country.
To make this round fairer, we limited purchases of Durov’s Sunglasses
Should we release 2-3 more gifts on September 1st with even tighter buying restrictions?
Meanwhile, Coinbase Ventures has also started accumulating TON.
Exciting times ahead! 🚀
Tap
https://t.me/nft/PlushPepe-858
“If these can’t be taken away from me, I want them all.”
Here’s what I said about this 7.5 years ago — still true today.
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We’ve been receiving great feedback from the owners of large channels and groups. And this is just the beginning — direct messages in channels lay the foundation for much more in the weeks ahead
Meet Threaded Chats — a simple yet powerful way to organize conversations by topic or sender. Already available in large groups (where admins can enable it) and in the brand-new channel inboxes — yes, channels can now receive direct messages from users, and even charge for them if they wish. Enjoy!
Telegram + Grok =
🇦🇪 I’ll be in Dubai the first week of June — good news ahead.
🎉 Telegram Premium now has over 15 million paid subscribers. The number has doubled in just one year. Thank you for going Premium!
Let’s keep it going like this
A Western European government (guess which
You can’t “defend democracy” by destroying democracy. You can’t “fight election interference” by interfering with elections. You either have freedom of speech and fair elections — or you don’t. And the Romanian people deserve both.
We’ve caught WhatsApp running smear PR campaigns against Telegram, so it’s only fair we hit back. No more playing nice — gloves off now
It’s time to wake WhatsApp users up. They’re trapped in the past, using late, watered-down versions of innovations Telegram pioneered long before.
To help you get started, we’ve included 30 major features that Telegram introduced first — all later cloned by our green rival. Obviously, this list isn’t exhaustive. It doesn’t even cover the many features Telegram users enjoy that still don’t exist on WhatsApp — those would take dozens of slides.
That’s why we’re not worried about WhatsApp trying to catch up with us — we’re too far ahead. Anyway, the $50,000 contest ends May 26 — check it out here.
The members of the National Assembly were wise to reject a law that would have made France the first country in the world to strip its citizens of their right to privacy. Even countries that many Europeans view as lacking in freedoms have never banned encryption. Why?
Because it’s technically impossible to guarantee that only the police can access a backdoor. Once introduced, a backdoor can be exploited by other parties — from foreign agents to hackers. As a result, the private messages of all law abiding citizens can get compromised.
Aimed at preventing drug trafficking, the law wouldn’t have helped fight crime anyway. Even if mainstream encrypted apps had been weakened by a backdoor, criminals could still communicate securely through dozens of smaller apps — and become even harder to trace due to VPNs.
This is why, as I’ve said before, Telegram would rather exit a market than undermine encryption with backdoors and violate basic human rights. Unlike some of our competitors, we don’t trade privacy for market share.
In it’s 12-year history, Telegram has never disclosed a single byte of private messages. In accordance with the EU Digital Services Act, if provided with a valid court order, Telegram would only disclose the IP addresses and phone numbers of criminal suspects — not messages.
Last month, freedom prevailed. But it was a reminder: we must keep explaining to lawmakers that encryption isn’t built to protect criminals — it protects the privacy and safety of ordinary people. Losing that protection would be tragic.
The battle is far from over. This month, the European Commission proposed a similar initiative to add backdoors to messaging apps. No country is immune to the slow erosion of freedoms. Every day, those freedoms come under attack — and every day, we must defend them.
We issued bonds four years ago — at a time when Telegram had zero revenue and half the user base we have today.
🏦 What makes the difference is our bondholders: some of the world’s most reputable global funds. Their continued support helps Telegram stay independent and grow stronger in any economic environment
Peter Fenton, Partner at Benchmark:
Telegram’s user base, which is expected to grow to over 1.5 billion through 2030, creates an unprecedented opportunity in the history of humanity to provide ubiquitous financial flows that have been limited until now to information flows, TON provides the backbone for human-scale democratization of financial activity.
Micky Malka, Founder at Ribbit:
Ribbit partners with exceptional teams tackling and solving the world’s biggest problems. TON and Telegram exemplify this, working together to expand financial access globally by coupling the best technology with a seamless consumer experience.
Tim Draper, Founder of Draper Associates:
I’ve been a long-time believer in the potential of blockchain to disrupt traditional industries and systems. TON’s technology is highly impressive, and its integration with Telegram provides it with a distribution that no other blockchain can match.
Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital: The TON team is the best in the world at the intersection of consumer product thinking and crypto infrastructure. When you combine this with the global distribution of Telegram, we’re very excited to see where they go.
