I thought Pavel Durov (founder) isn't really welcome in Russia. He seems to have a left a lot of money on the table with his previous company (VK) to get out of there.
The interpretation of events with telegram I've always heard has been that Russia tried to block telegram but doing so blocked most of the rest of useful services as telegram was hosted on e.g. AWS. This meant that real work was slowed. In the end, they gave up because continuing the block would mean crippling their access to the internet.
I have found it weird that pro-putin russians still use telegram. But it seems like a lack of discipline which is quite the plague of russian military.
I'd genuinely love to get good information on this as I use telegram as it is a great piece of technology and wouldn't if it were collaborating with russian government. I think a lot of rumors do not distinguish between russian people and russian government. And that's pretty damaging.
I know that it would be hard to get good evidence here but I still think the burden of proof lies on the more extreme claim. Which to me is that a company founded by someone fleeing oppression would work directly with the oppressor.
The example of messages appearing as 'read' does not imply to me that telegram is working with them - rather that the her app was compromised by other means. Otherwise, why create such a flaw in your monitoring?
Meduza - news organization criminally charged in russia operating in latvia - is mostly accessed in russia via telegram. It's hard but not impossible to imagine that the russian government would allow it to remain uncensored.
I'm seeing quoted statements by the russian government in the article that I cannot verify elsewhere but I'm unable to see telegram making a statement from their side of working with the russian government.
I'm truly interested in getting to the bottom of this. This wired piece doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in it's trustworthiness but I'm unable to find something with more concrete sources or at least a better reputation.
https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/friendship-betrayal-clai...
while the whole store is about on how Durov tried to sleep with authors wife and tried to put pressure on him using his work position, author did expose facts which very interesting:
- telegram office in sankt petersburg sharing same office that mail ru does (and mail ru basically is pro government org)
- telegram team still contributes to vkotankte and they do share some software components connect to online messaging
- most interesting russian oligarchs has very big influence on the products (vkontakte and telegram). While both productions trying to tell its not true, behind the doors they do have well established process of giving data when certain criterias are met