Telegram is under Belgian supervision, and there is talk of a ban in the Netherlands. The messaging app does not give up its secrets easily. Is the excitement surrounding Telegram justified or exaggerated?

According to the company, the messaging app Telegram has 950 million active monthly users worldwide. Since 2020, Telegram’s popularity has grown rapidly and welcomes around a hundred million new users every year. Telegram is one of WhatsApp’s biggest challengers among messaging apps.

Still, Telegram’s reputation is far from spotless. The Amsterdam city council has decided to ban the messaging app from civil servants’ work phones. In the Netherlands, too, the app has been under fire in national politics for some time. In Spain, the government already tried to ban the app completely, but a judge quickly overturned the ban.

At first glance, Telegram seems like an ordinary messaging app. So where does the controversy come from? And is there a reason for it? Telegram does not reveal its secrets and this makes policymakers suspicious.

Symbol for opposition

Privacy and anonymity are key selling points for Telegram: the result of the application’s special history. Telegram was born in 2013. The founders Nikolai and Pavel Durov previously founded the social media VKontakte The Russian government took control of this platform and the brothers wanted to prevent Telegram from suffering the same fate.

Telegram has come into conflict with the regime on several occasions. In 2018, the Russian government banned Telegram because it did not want to share its encryption keys. This led to protests across the country in which Pavel Durov actively participated. This made the messaging app a symbol of the opposition in Russia.

Telegram was able to cleverly circumvent this ban by redirecting its IP addresses to American cloud servers, far beyond the reach of regulators. Pavel and Nikolai Durov fled Russia a decade ago and applied for citizenship in France, the United Arab Emirates, and St. Kitts and Nevis.

Breaking with the past

It is precisely because of this turbulent relationship with their homeland that the Durov brothers do everything to avoid associations between Telegram and Moscow. The platform is officially owned by two companies: Telegram FZ LLC and Telegram Messenger Inc. Telegram is officially registered in the British Virgin Islands, its headquarters have been moved to Dubai.

But the past seems to haunt Telegram. The fact that the Amsterdam city council cites espionage as an argument for excluding Telegram is due to the nationality of the founders. This has already happened to Kaspersky in the USA, with the difference that the security provider’s headquarters are in Moscow.

Telegram claims to have data centers all over the world, but remains silent about where exactly they are located. Data from European users is stored in a data center in the Amsterdam area.

Drugs, weapons and propaganda

So the spying argument is rather dubious, but that is not the only problem with Telegram. A spokesperson for the city of Amsterdam literally described Telegram in the Dutch media as “a haven for hackers, cybercriminals and drug traffickers.” Telegram regularly appears negatively in the news because it is the app of choice in dubious environments, from drug traffickers and terrorists to the distribution of pornography.

Telegram places great value on privacy and anonymity and goes to great lengths to protect users. In terms of functionality, the app lies somewhere between a classic messaging app like WhatsApp and a social media platform like Reddit. Groups can be found publicly via a search bar and you can join completely anonymously.

This can make Telegram a useful channel for businesses to reach customers, but it also applies to less legitimate businesses. Telegram also doesn’t differentiate between active and inactive phone numbers, so you can easily create an account with a temporary phone number.

The messaging app also seems to be a popular platform for spreading fake news and propaganda. Like-minded people can be found in anonymous groups that can have up to 200,000 users. During the Corona period, the wildest conspiracy theories circulated and pro-Russian fake news is also being spread en masse via the app. At the same time, Russians are using Telegram to search for uncensored news about the Ukraine war.

Telegram is accused of letting all this slide. Spokesperson Remi Vaughn strongly denies this in a written response to ITdaily. “Since its launch, Telegram has actively moderated harmful content on its platform. Moderators use a combination of proactive moderation and user notifications to remove content that violates the terms of service. Telegram guarantees that all correctly submitted reports will be processed.”

Belgian supervision

Under the DSA, Telegram was placed under Belgian supervision: the BIPT was tasked with checking whether the messaging app complies with its legal obligations. Telegram chose to do this itself. The company does not have an office on European territory and has appointed the Belgian ESDR as its representative.

It is important to note that the European Commission has also not classified Telegram as a VLOP Very large online platform. As a result, Telegram is not subject to the strictest set of rules, unlike X, for example, which does not adhere to the DSA rules as closely as it should. According to the law, not only the large services but also “smaller” Internet platforms are responsible for the behavior of their users. Telegram is therefore no exception to the rule.

“BIPT monitors Telegram under the DSA rules, which relate to hosting services, but not to interpersonal messaging services,” BIPT spokesperson Jimmy Smedts tells editors. “This means that BIPT checks whether Telegram complies with its obligations as a hosting service, such as the ability to report messages and content that users consider problematic.”

“The task of the BIPT is not to search for possible illegal content on Telegram. In this context, there is no concrete evidence yet that Telegram is not complying with the procedural obligations imposed on it in the DSA,” says Smedts.

Own encryption

Because of its deep-rooted focus on privacy, Telegram is sometimes referred to as a “safer” alternative to WhatsApp. The messaging app is not backed by a company that has made a billion-dollar business out of personal data. Whether this name is justified is debatable.

Like WhatsApp, Telegram applies end-to-end encryption to chat messages. Encryption ensures that only you and the recipient of the message can see the content and no one else. Please note: With Telegram, unlike WhatsApp, you have to enable this manually. Only “secret chats” are encrypted. In these secret chats, you can make messages “disappear” after you have read them.

Opinions are divided about the protocol used by Telegram. The app does not rely on open encryption standards, but has developed its own protocol, MTProto 2.0. The company has blind faith in its own abilities: it organizes competitions to crack the security and makes the code openly available. So far, there have been hardly any notable incidents with the app, although researchers have discovered a few security vulnerabilities.

Telegram only applies encryption to “secret chats”.

Do you follow TikTok?

It is rare for an application to end up on the blacklist. The most notorious example is perhaps TikTok. Due to uncertainty over the links between parent company ByteDance and the Chinese government (and under American pressure), the Belgian government decided in March last year to ban the app for government officials and ministers.

If there are fears that the Kremlin could be reading Telegram, it seems to be out of the blue. But Telegram is not quite the secret fortress it claims to be. The fact that encryption is not a default setting is at odds with the founders’ philosophy. The controversial content is problematic, but unless you look for it, you won’t come across it.

To put it briefly: No app is completely flawless. WhatsApp can also be abused for malicious purposes. Telegram is not necessarily more secure, but there is no irrefutable evidence that it is less secure than alternatives.