😎 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. ✊

🔄 Your massive monthly Telegram update is out.

🧠 100% private AI Editor for your outgoing messages.
🗳 The most powerful polls in any messenger (+12 new features).
🖼 Support for Live Photos & Motion Photos.
🤖 Ability for [AI] Bots to create [AI] Bots for users — in one tap.

📹 Demos: https://telegram.org/blog/ai-editor-mighty-polls-and-more

Meet the most powerful polls tech in social media. Telegram's update packs a dozen new features:

🗳 Attach photos, videos & audios to options
💡 Let users suggest new options in active polls
🔐 Disable revoting for fixed results
😃 Shuffle options per user
⏱ Set time limits on polls
👀 Show who voted next to each option
📊 View results without voting
🔔 Get notified when someone votes
📂 View all polls in groups / channels
🫣 Hide results until the poll ends
🧠 Add correct answers and explanations for wrong picks

🔜 We're already working on more — 📊 polls stats, plus options to limit voting to channel subscribers or users from selected countries. Bot rigging of polls in large channels became a massive issue, and we're building the tools to stop it. 🛡

✨ Our new fully private AI Editor lets you translate and proofread your messages — or rewrite them in Tribal, Zen, Corp, Biblical, or Viking styles.

🎨 This month, anyone will be able to create & share their own styles.

🐣 A new platform inside Telegram is being born!

🇪🇺 The EU is trying to justify its push for more surveillance (Chat Control) and censorship (DSA) via controlled NGOs and media. AI Forensics, a Soros-funded contractor to the European Commission, is telling us that Telegram is a PROBLEM because people can discuss content from OTHER social media in PRIVATE telegram groups (see the screenshot from state-owned France24 below).

📣 The crazy narrative of this "non-governmental" organization is distributed by globalist outlets (El País, Der Spiegel, Wired) and AFP (France’s “ITAR-TASS”), which is carbon-copied by the “free” French press (Le Parisien, 20 Minutes, Ouest-France, Le Figaro).

I doubt anyone still takes these organizations seriously 🤡 — most of them lost people's trust during the COVID era. But it’s important to call out all such attempts at public manipulation, because they are used to take away what's left of our freedoms. 🗽

🚀 The TON blockchain just got upgraded and is now 10× faster.

⚡️ Block rate increased 6×.

⏱ Transactions are now instant, subsecond.

🪙 This was step 1 of 7 to Make TON Great Again (MTONGA).

Next step: cut the already low transaction fees by 6×. ✂️

🤥 WhatsApp’s “encryption” may be the biggest consumer fraud in history — deceiving billions of users. Despite its claims, it reads users’ messages and shares them with third parties. Telegram has never done this — and never will 🤝

🚨 Another proof that Telegram’s Secret Chats are the most secure way to communicate. The FBI got access to deleted messages in US gov-funded app Signal just by checking the notifications data. On Telegram, Secret Chats never show message content in push notifications, so, unlike Signal and other supposedly secure apps, we don’t have this risk.

🔛 Turning off notification previews won’t make you safe if you use those apps, because you never know whether the people you message have done the same. So Telegram’s Secret Chats design that forces the absence of notifications previews is the only solution. Obviously, this hurts usability, that’s why Telegram has two types of chats: Secret and Cloud.

🤹 In general, apps that are trying to provide both security and usability in ONE type of chat end up with ugly compromises — like WhatsApp leaking 95% of messages via unencrypted backups or Signal exposing messages through push notifications. The only way is to have two types of chats: 100% usable (Cloud) and 100% secure (Secret).

📆 12+ years passed since Telegram started the end-to-end encryption revolution by launching Secret Chats. Since then, dozens of apps followed suit and made bold claims about their encryption. But no app has been able to beat our Cloud Chats in usability and our Secret Chats in security. Their try to mix the two and get neither.

🔐 We’ve upgraded Telegram’s anti-censorship protocol. Users in Russia are advised to update their apps to stay connected despite the ban.

⚠️ Some other advice: stock up on several VPNs/proxies in advance, help your friends and family do the same, and avoid using Russian apps while connected to a VPN (they may report your VPN to authorities for blocking).

💪 I’m glad to see most people are already doing this. Thanks to this Digital Resistance, Telegram usage in Russia has remained stable over the past week despite the full ban.

🔥 Keep it up. On our side, we’ll continue improving Telegram’s decentralized anti-censorship tech.

⚠️ 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 💬

🗽 Anyone under 25 can win €100,000 for an essay on digital freedoms. The Youth Liberty Prize 2026 supports young thinkers ready to defend freedom from threats like censorship, surveillance, digital IDs and CBDCs.

Stand for freedom and win ✊

Full details: https://www.libertyprize.org/

Group admins can assign tags to users — or embrace the chaos and let them assign their own. 🔥

⚡️ 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.

✅ The Telegram Login SDK now supports native iOS and Android apps.📱

🤩 Only Telegram lets developers verify users’ phone numbers for free — something that’s otherwise expensive. 🫰

🍴 Expect more apps adding “Continue with Telegram"! 🚀

🇫🇷 Macron’s France is losing legitimacy as it weaponizes criminal investigations to suppress free speech and privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice has refused to assist France in its investigation of Elon Musk, calling the case politically motivated.

🎭 The French prosecutor’s office claims to be independent, but that is untrue: French prosecutors are hired, fired, and promoted by the government. The judicial police — who provide often misleading reports to investigative judges — are also controlled by the government.

I’m under a similar investigation in France: over a dozen charges, each carrying up to 10 years in prison. Proud to stand alongside Elon Musk and others targeted by Macron's campaign against digital rights. In Macron’s France, being investigated is the new Légion d’honneur.🎖

This is how the EU/UK now regulates social media:

🤐 Offer CEOs secret deals to censor dissent.
🚨 If they refuse, open criminal cases against them.
😑 When people push back, say it's "all for the children".

"Protecting children" has become the standard legal/PR cover. 🎭

The apartment in Russia where I lived 20 years ago received a summons for “Suspect P. V. Durov”.

They must be suspecting me of defending Articles 29 and 23 of the Russian Constitution — which guarantee freedom of speech and the right to private correspondence.

Proud to be guilty! 😏