Why Charges Against Us in Iran And Russia Don’t Matter

Some users ask me how the charges in Iran and Russia will affect Telegram and me personally. The simple answer to this is: they won’t.

It’s easy for me not to travel to Iran – while the country has a rich history and sounds like a fun place, I have no connections with it and can live with that travel ban. It’s a bit more noticeable in case of Russia since I am an ethnic Russian (although with a St. Kitts passport), and my parents live there. Not being able to occasionally drop by is not great, but a small price to pay considering the matters at stake.

Luckily, we don’t have any legal presence in any of these countries. The last remaining link between Telegram and Russia was cut in July, when we terminated our contract with “Telegraf” – a Saint-Petersburg-based company to which we outsourced fighting spam coming from (surprise) Russia and Iran.

“Telegraf” used to play a larger role in the early days of Telegram when I was living in Russia, losing its importance after I left in 2014 with our core team.

Following the events this June when the Russian authorities threatened to block Telegram, “Telegraf” lost its outsourcing contract from Telegram Messenger, let go all of its employees and changed its owner. By September when the Russian authorities started sending warnings to our London office, they had nobody to target in their jurisdiction, not even Russian spam moderators.

This story highlights something local regulators often tend to ignore: it’s 2017, and the world is open and connected. If you pass archaic laws that limit freedoms, all you’ll end up doing is killing your own economy. In the last few years, Google, Oracle and Microsoft (Skype) shut down their development offices in Russia, and many smaller companies followed suit.

While the state of affairs in Iran doesn't look much brighter than in Russia, things seem to be going in the right direction there compared with the situation a few years ago. I’m not an expert on Iran, but one thing about the country is clear to me: despite the continuing debate among the Iranian politicians on how to regulate the Internet, Iran is not blocking Telegram, and for the last few years 40 millions Iranians have been able to securely communicate and to get news from independent sources through Telegram channels. Instagram and WhatsApp are also accessible there.

For any European this would sound like the norm, but unfortunately it’s not always like this in the world. The Chinese and the North Koreans, for example, are far less lucky when it comes to such freedoms, and Saudi Arabia had been throttling Telegram’s traffic until recently. The situation in Iran itself used to be very different: almost all major internet services were blocked in the country several years ago (some of them still are).

Don’t get me wrong: there are probably many things that Iran can change for the better (a more IT-friendly prosecutor of Tehran, perhaps?), but overall it seems that the country is moving in the right direction by becoming more open and market-driven.

I hope that one day Iran and Russia get to a point when we (and other IT companies) will be able to set up offices there. Until then, we’ll continue providing secure messaging to users in these markets from places that respect freedom.

We don't care if specific countries press charges against us for defending the privacy of our users. We are always ready to cut all our personal and business links to such places so that they don't have any leverage on us. They can try to block us on their territory, but, as I've shown in my previous post about China, even this won't always help them. Eventually freedom and privacy will prevail, and those who would like to get back to the 1930s will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

An epic Telegram update is coming today. Along with some cool new features such as Live Locations and the new Music Player, Telegram 4.4's UI supports many more languages that you’ve been asking us to add, namely French (I’m still excited that “stickers” are in fact “autocollants”), Indonesian, Malay, Russian, Ukrainian and – very soon – Persian.

As someone who majored in linguistics, I know there are thousands of small details that are easy to miss when you translate things into other languages.

That’s why we’re launching the Telegram Localization Platform today – it allows our users to suggest and vote for translations of phrases found in the Telegram UI. Unlike other apps, we can instantly push fixes for the localized versions of Telegram from the server-side, without forcing our users to update the whole app for a few changes in wording.

So if you’re unhappy about how a specific word in the Telegram UI was translated into your language, go ahead and suggest an alternative at translations.telegram.org. If the new version you suggested outvotes the currently applied one (and a Telegram admin approves it), your change will instantly go live for millions of users.

You already know Telegram has your back when it comes to privacy. Another human right we feel passionately about is the freedom of speech. In some countries Telegram is the only popular platform for independent sources of information. Take Iran for example, where the BBC is blocked, but its @bbcpersian channel has been active for years and attracted almost a million followers. There are thousands of large Telegram channels that are critical of their governments.

Telegram has never yielded to pressure from officials who wanted us to perform political censorship. Freedom of speech is one of the values we’ve been defending for the last 11 years, first in Russia, and then globally.

Of course, there are rules that admins of Telegram channels should respect, for example, Telegram ToS prohibit publicly promoting violence in any form. This is why this October alone we have blocked over 8,500 channels related to terrorism (more stats in @isiswatch).

Another recent example of a line one shouldn’t cross is an Iranian channel that started to urge its members to throw stones into the windows of public buildings and vehicles (schools, temples, buses) and film it. We got in touch with the channel admins and asked them to stop this vandalism contest; not only did they ignore us, but launched another creepy competition urging their 100K+ users to burn mosques by throwing Molotov cocktails into them and film it. As a result, we were left with no other options but to block their channel.

For us, the line is pretty straightforward. Criticizing local authorities, challenging the status quo and engaging in political debate are OK. Meanwhile, promoting violence and calling for actions that can harm innocent people are not OK. This is a rule of thumb we’re always applying when moderating public channels.

Happy Winter Solstice! May your wishes come true ✨🌟

Happy New Year, everyone! 🎉
I hope you enjoyed the Telegram product updates this December. Stay tuned – we are going to make 3 big announcements in January.

On a less joyful note, Iranian authorities started blocking Telegram in Iran today after we publicly refused to shut down channels of peaceful Iranian protesters, such as @sedaiemardom.

We are proud that Telegram is used by thousands of massive opposition channels all over the world. We consider freedom of speech an undeniable human right, and would rather get blocked in a country by its authorities than limit peaceful expression of alternative opinions.

When it comes to freedom of speech, Telegram is as unrestricted as a mobile app can get. In 2015, after Apple and Google reached out to us in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, we added the simplest Terms of Service theoretically possible in an app: no calls for violence, no porn and no copyright infringement on public broadcast channels.

Since then, Telegram has been blocking hundreds of violent public channels daily (including those reported in @isiswatch), making sure our rules are applied equally and fairly to all players, regardless of their size and political affiliation.

Yesterday we had to suspend @amadnews, a public channel that started calling its subscribers to use Molotov cocktails and firearms against police. The admins of the channel reached out to us after the fact, apologizing for breaking our rules and pledging not to promote violence in the future. As a result, they have been able to reassemble most of their subscribers (800,000) in a new peaceful channel, which we welcomed.

Obviously, our neutrality and refusal to take sides in such conflicts can create powerful enemies. Iranian officials have filed criminal charges against me back in September for letting Telegram spread “uncensored news” and “extremist propaganda”. Today they imposed a block on Telegram – not clear whether permanent or temporary.

And yet, doing the right thing is more important than trying to avoid having enemies. We’re extremely lucky to have been able to consistently apply our principles in 2017. We will continue doing it in 2018 – and beyond.

The Kaspersky antivirus company claimed today they found a “0-day vulnerability on Telegram for Windows”, which affected “1000 users before it was fixed”.

As always, reports from antivirus companies must be taken with a grain of salt, as they tend to exaggerate the severity of their findings to get publicity in mass media. Telegram Geeks, a community of Telegram fans, gave a good explanation of what it really was about:

Happy Valentine's Day! I see some good art in trending stickers, be sure to check it out.

Every service growing too fast is bound to experience growing pains; unfortunately, Telegram is no exception, although we strive to be one.

Many of our European users noticed connection issues earlier today. Those were caused by planned maintenance by our data center provider, which unfortunately lead to unplanned downtime. Thanks to Telegram’s distributed infrastructure, Americas and East Asia were not affected by the issues.

We sincerely apologize for the inconveniences this might have caused – we know tens of millions of Europeans rely on Telegram for communication with their colleagues and loved ones.

To make sure such disruptions don’t happen again, we have established a more direct and real-time communication between our engineers and the data center electricians, and, more importantly, started upgrading our power-related equipment to add even more redundancy.

Thank you for your support and patience during this time.

The power that local governments have over IT corporations is based on money. At any given moment, a government can crash their stocks by threatening to block revenue streams from its markets and thus force these companies to do strange things (remember how last year Apple moved iCloud servers to China).

At Telegram, we have the luxury of not caring about revenue streams or ad sales. Privacy is not for sale, and human rights should not be compromised out of fear or greed.

For the last 24 hours Telegram has been under a ban by internet providers in Russia. The reason is our refusal to provide encryption keys to Russian security agencies. For us, this was an easy decision. We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise.

Despite the ban, we haven’t seen a significant drop in user engagement so far, since Russians tend to bypass the ban with VPNs and proxies. We also have been relying on third-party cloud services to remain partly available for our users there.

Thank you for your support and loyalty, Russian users of Telegram. Thank you, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft – for not taking part in political censorship.

Russia accounts for ~7% of the Telegram user base, and even if we lose that entire market, Telegram’s organic growth in other regions will compensate for this loss within a couple of months. However, it is important for me personally to make sure we do everything we can for our Russian users.

To support internet freedoms in Russia and elsewhere I started giving out bitcoin grants to individuals and companies who run socks5 proxies and VPN. I am happy to donate millions of dollars this year to this cause, and hope that other people will follow. I called this Digital Resistance – a decentralized movement standing for digital freedoms and progress globally.

For 7 days Russia has been trying to ban Telegram on its territory – with no luck so far. I’m thrilled we were able to survive under the most aggressive attempt of internet censorship in Russian history with almost 18 million IP addresses blocked.

If you live in Russia and support free internet, fly a paper plane from your window at 7 PM local time today. Please collect the airplanes in your neighborhood an hour later – remember, today is Earth Day.

My thanks to all the members of the #DigitalResistance movement. Keep up your great work setting up socks5-proxies and VPNs and spreading them among your Russian friends and relatives. They will be needed as the country descends into an era of full-scale internet censorship.

Moscow today.