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[email protected] It gets a bit worse, Telegram has a long-standing relationship with a Saudi organization that's essentially a govt arm in Riyadh, working in direct partnership to analyze and monitor an obscene amount of user data: https://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/641746/SAUDI-ARABIA/Etidal-Telegram-remove-over-16-million-extremist-contents-in-early-2024
They claim this only targets terrorist groups. I can verify that it absolutely impacts groups run by queer communities in the Gulf, because I was in one such group that was monitored and shut down by Etidal.
Telegram can fuck off into the sunset.
It gets worse when you watch his interview with Tucker Carlson … guy said if a government forces us to censor a group it’ll only censored from the app you get from big tech play stores… That’s horseshit… If you censor a group from your platform, it’ll be removed from all people’s feeds regardless of their clients or from where they got the app…
telegram has different visibility based on which client you are using and your phone number’s region. I’ve seen it firsthand how some channels are not available on telegram downloaded from app store vs direct apk download. unless if you mean in spirit they’re basically the same which i agree but everyone that has used telegram at all knows that telegram values being accessible more than free speech and privacy.
the right word is “visible”… discoverability on Telegram has always being broken, as in you search for a channel, good luck finding it!.. like you said it’s because of your phone number region… Etc… that has been fixed when they introduced similar channels feature, since then I never used that broken search functionality… But once you find and join a channel, if Telegram mods decided to censor some posts or remove the entire channel, it’ll be removed from all clients… unless there is some client out there who saves snapshots of all channels or posts ( somehow )
by available i meant available. it’s on a per channel/group basis and not on individual messages but essentially you can’t join or view their messages even if you have their id and even if someone forwards it to you it displays a “this message is nor available on clients downloaded from google play” error message or something similar. if you joined a channel prior and it get blocked from your client you stay in but can’t view its messages.