🇪🇸 My message to Telegram users in Spain ❗️

Pedro Sánchez’s government is pushing dangerous new regulations that threaten your internet freedoms. Announced just yesterday, these measures could turn Spain into a surveillance state under the guise of “protection.” Here’s why they’re a red flag for free speech and privacy:

1. Ban on social media for under-16s with mandatory age verification: This isn’t just about kids—it requires platforms to use strict checks, like needing IDs or biometrics.

⚠️ Danger: It sets a precedent for tracking EVERY user’s identity, eroding anonymity and opening doors to mass data collection. What starts with minors could expand to all, stifling open discourse.

2. Personal and criminal liability for platform executives: If “illegal, hateful, or harmful” content isn’t removed fast enough, bosses face jail.

⚠️ Danger: This will force over-censorship—platforms will delete anything remotely controversial to avoid risks, silencing political dissent, journalism, and everyday opinions. Your voice could be next if it challenges the status quo.

3. Criminalizing algorithm amplification: Amplifying “harmful” content via algorithms becomes a crime.

⚠️ Danger: Governments will dictate what you see, burying opposing views and creating echo chambers controlled by the state. Free exploration of ideas? Gone—replaced by curated propaganda.

4. “Hate and polarization footprint” tracking: Platforms must monitor and report how they “fuel division.”

⚠️ Danger: Vague definitions of “hate” could label criticism of the government as divisive, leading to shutdowns or fines. This can be a tool for suppressing opposition.

These aren’t safeguards; they’re steps toward total control. We’ve seen this playbook before—governments weaponizing “safety” to censor critics. On Telegram, we prioritize your privacy and freedom: strong encryption, no backdoors, and resistance to overreach.

✊ Stay vigilant, Spain. Demand transparency and fight for your rights. Share this widely—before it’s too late.

💣 Russia has opened a criminal case against me for “aiding terrorism.” Each day, the authorities fabricate new pretexts to restrict Russians’ access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech. A sad spectacle of a state afraid of its own people. 🤦‍♂️

😎 Telegram was banned in Russia — yet 65M Russians still use it daily via VPNs, with 50M+ sending messages every day. The government has spent years trying to ban VPNs too. Their blocking attempts just triggered a massive banking failure — cash briefly became the only payment method nationwide yesterday. 😂

🧊 Iran banned Telegram years ago, with a result similar to Russia. The government hoped for mass adoption of its surveillance messaging apps, but got mass adoption of VPNs instead. Now 50M members of the Digital Resistance in Iran are joined by 50M+ more in Russia. 😙

🤝 Welcome back to the Digital Resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters. The entire nation is now mobilized to bypass these absurd restrictions. Thousands are building VPNs and proxies. On our end, we’ll keep adapting — making Telegram’s traffic harder to detect and block. ✊

⚠️ WhatsApp’s “End-to-end encryption by default” claim is a giant consumer fraud.

📖 ~95% of private messages on WhatsApp end up in plain-text backups on Apple/Google servers — not E2E-encrypted. Backup encryption is optional, and few people enable it — let alone use strong passwords.

🔑Even if you encrypt your WhatsApp backups with a strong password, your messages still end up in unencrypted cloud backups — because 90%+ of the people you message haven’t done the same. Add the fact that WhatsApp stores and discloses who you chat with, and the picture is dire.

📤 Apple and Google disclose backed-up WhatsApp messages to third parties thousands of times per year. Meanwhile, Telegram hasn’t disclosed a single byte of users’ messages in its entire 12+ year history 💬

⚡️ You can now create agentic bots in just 2 taps 🤖

Ask the devs of the services you use to support it 👇

https://core.telegram.org/bots/features#managed-bots

🇪🇺 The EU wants to force mandatory ID checks on anyone using social media — and ban people under 18 from accessing it. To that end, the EU Commission spent over a year building an “age verification app”, which its president pompously unveiled yesterday.

Today, this app got hacked in just 2 minutes.

But don’t rush to laugh at EU bureaucrats.

Their age verification app was hackable by design — it trusted the device (that’s instant game over). Unless the EU is run by clowns 🤡, this is their real plan:

Step 1 — Present a “privacy-respecting” but hackable app.
Step 2 — Get hacked (*YOU ARE HERE*).
Step 3 — Remove privacy to “fix” the app.

Result — a surveillance tool sold as “privacy-respecting”.

The EU bureaucrats needed an excuse to silently start turning their “privacy-respecting” age verification app into a surveillance mechanism over all Europeans using social media. Today’s “surprising hack” just handed this excuse to them.

🦇 Stay vigilant!

🎁 Our new Login Widget is a gift to developers: they can not only quickly authorize users, but also request users’ phone numbers and permission to message them on Telegram.

🆓 Sign-up, login, phone verification, and a follow-up communication channel in one — completely free.