Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

And it only works because a corporation likely would want to offer this to its users as a convenient feature. If they were actively trying to hide this, they can rig the test and keep access to themselves.

You seem to be living on this weird balance of having no threat model. This is what your post implies

1. Signal is bad and insecure because registering user account requires giving a phone number. 2. Matrix is better, it fixes this by registering with emails (although emails also have zero click vulnerabilities) 3. Telegram is better than Matrix, it's more usable (even though it also requires a phone number like Signal)

So pick a lane, is requiring a phone-number a litmus-test for you or not. Is zero-click vulnerability something that needs to be addressed? How do you deal with malicious contacts or people in public groups sending zero-click links?

Do you read other news sites that mention Telegram or is this an N=1 situation?

Today, on the same topic, another tech site which generally gets a lot of things right (but whoever is responsible for writing about Telegram, or maybe their internal KB, is consistently wrong and doesn't care about feedback) wrote that it is an encrypted chats service: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/225750/ceo-en-oprichter-telegram... ("versleutelde-chatdienst" means that for those fact checking at home)

I can give you some insight into why EU law enforcement and politicians dislike telegram. It’s not because they can’t snoop on you, it’s because Telegram fails to comply with moderation requests for channels where illegal content is shared.

We had a nice scandal of sorts here in Denmark where a bunch of young men shared pictures of young women without consent. If you’re old enough to remember those old “rate this girl” web pages from the 90ies you’ll know what the pictures were used for. Basically it was a huge database on hot girls in Denmark and where they went to school. Today around 1000 young men have that on their permanent record as Facebook worked with law enforcement to catch the criminals. Telegram doesn’t do that. This was even a little more innocent that it may sound, considering the men were at least aged similar to the women they were sharing pictures of. Disgusting and illegal, but Telegram houses far worse and refuses to deal with it.

I know a lot of tech minded people are up in arms over this, but it’s really mainly about not wanting an unmoderated social network. Not because big brother is angry, but because people use it to organise bullying, share revenge porn, sell drugs and far, far, worse. There is also political factions within the EU who rants to kill encryption (though they were severely weakened when the brits left), but the anger against SoMe platforms is much more “European”. In that we (and I say this as the EU culture in general, not as in 100% of us) tend to view the people who enable bad behaviour as being participating in that behaviour. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have been sort of protected by being early movers with mass adoption. Being American companies probably helps as well considering EU / US relations. Telegram never had such advantages, and is further disadvantaged by how its almost exclusively used for crime in Western Europe.

Obviously banning the platform won’t help. There will just be another platform. But then, we’ve also been losing a drug war for 50+ years even though we can’t even keep drugs out of our prisons.

BS. Vast majority of non-tech users do not, for a simple reason that they can't know it even if they cared, and they do not. Even tech users can't be bothered to read links to the faq on tg site.

There is so much misinformation around telegram that alone made me trust it more (if a known liar tries to discredit something, it increases chances of it being good--it is about comments here on HN).