Telegram also has social networking features, allowing users to post stories, create large public groups with up to 200,000 members, or share one-way updates to unlimited audiences in so-called channels.

Premium users have access to extra stickers, emoji, reactions, and customization features like a special badge and the ability to change the look of their messages in chats.

Telegraph natively supports Instant View, a feature which lets users read full articles in the chat with no load time and without opening an external browser.

The ban applied to non-U.S.-based purchasers as well, because Telegram could not prevent the re-sale of Grams to U.S. citizens on a secondary market, as the anonymity of users was one of the key features of TON.

Organized use of the app has been linked to pro-democracy protests in Belarus,[244] Russia,[245] Hong Kong[246] and Iran,[247] as well as to the dissemination of state propaganda and violent rhetoric in oppressive regimes, the promotion of extremist views, and the digitalization of services provided by government entities and private businesses.

While Telegram made substantial efforts[255][256] to ban illegal content such as child abuse and pro-terrorist channels, including a partnership with Europol[257] to eliminate IS presence on the platform, communities of far-left and far-right, antivaxx, Antifa and extremist users are still found on the app.

[258] In September 2024, Telegram announced that it will begin to hand over users' IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities who have search warrants or other valid legal requests.

In France, initial investigations[263] of a terrorist act revealed the perpetrators used Telegram to communicate, though follow-up research suggested that the extent of the app's use was "unclear".

In response to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights call to prevent such abuse, Telegram reportedly banned 13 accounts related to or supporting the Myanmar military.

[273] On 26 April 2023, Telegram was temporarily suspended throughout Brazil, and the company was fined R$1 million (2023) (US$185,528.76) per day for not complying with a Federal Police investigation into neo-Nazi activities on the platform.

The company only partially fulfilled a court request for personal data on two anti-Semitic Telegram groups, which authorities considered an intentional lack of cooperation.

[277] Far-right and white supremacist communities on Telegram have spread videos of the Christchurch and Halle shootings[278] in groups and channels after the original livestreams were taken down by Twitch.

However, research from the Oxford University[281] suggests that, due to Telegram not using sorting algorithms in its search function, many such groups remain obscure and small while select others receive a lot of attention.

[284][285] In January 2021, Macedonian media outlets reported that a now-banned Telegram group, with more than 7,000 members, titled "Public Room" ("Јавна соба") was used to share nude photos of women, often young teenage girls.

An investigation published in August 2024 by the BBC showed that Telegram has not responded to requests to join the US–based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), nor from the UK–based Internet Watch Foundation, both non–profit NGOs.

[290] In August 2024, Journalist Ko Narin of Hankyoreh exposed Telegram chats of teenagers who used AI to deepfake images of their classmates and teachers for porn.

[293][294] Volodymyr Flents, the chairman of the public organization "Electronic Democracy", announced on 11 May 2020 that a Telegram bot appeared on the Web, which sold the personal data of Ukrainian citizens.

The most common mode of fraud involves scammers sending messages to unsuspecting users, offering part-time online jobs which comprise a series of tasks.

[300][301] In July 2023, Hyderabad Police uncovered a fraud wherein 15,000 Indian citizens were duped out of ₹712 crore (US$82 million) in less than a year, all related to "prepaid tasks" on Telegram.

[319][320] Since July 2016, Line has also applied end-to-end encryption to all of its messages by default,[327] though it has also been criticized for being susceptible to replay attacks and the lack of forward secrecy between clients.

[331] In December 2015, two researchers from Aarhus University published a report in which they demonstrated that MTProto 1.0 did not achieve indistinguishability under chosen-ciphertext attack (IND-CCA) or authenticated encryption.

[337][339] In June 2017, Pavel Durov in an interview said that U.S. intelligence agencies tried to bribe the company's developers to weaken Telegram's encryption or install a backdoor during their visit to the U.S. in 2016.

[346] On 9 June 2019, The Intercept released leaked Telegram messages exchanged between current Brazilian Minister of Justice and former judge Sérgio Moro and federal prosecutors.

Several other theoretical vulnerabilities were reported as well, in response to which Telegram released a document stating that the MITM attack on the key exchange was impossible as well as detailing the changes made to the protocol to protect from it in the future.

Regarding Telegram, the report cites its lack of end-to-end encryption by default, its Russian origins and third-party open source intelligence as major critical points.

This was because the cryptography contest could not be won even with completely broken algorithms such as MD2 (hash function) used as key stream extractor, and primitives such as the Dual EC DRBG that is known to be backdoored.

The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine enforced the restrictions following evidence reported to them by Kyrylo Budanov, showing Russia's ability to access messages and user data on the platform.

Andriy Kovalenko, head of the security council's centre on countering disinformation, clarified that the ban was limited to official devices and did not extend to personal phones.

[384][385] On 24 August 2024, Pavel Durov, who is both a French and UAE citizen, was arrested in France by French authorities and four days later charged with a wide array of crimes, including complicity in managing an online platform to enable illegal transactions; complicity in crimes such as enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material; drug trafficking and fraud; and a refusal to cooperate with law enforcement authorities.

Durov posted bail of five million Euros, was barred from leaving France, and was released on condition he report to a French police station twice weekly.