🎉ANNIVERSARY: “CHANNEL” — 10 YEARS! 🎉

📰 On September 22, 2015, the September update of Telegram was released, which, in addition to channels, added support for notifications in iOS 9 and a modest photo editor.

At that time, the channels were also modest - the blog states that the channels are better in all respects than the «broadcast lists» presented in August 2014 - the first anniversary of the messenger. 😌 Namely: view counter in each message, can be public, can have an unlimited number of subscribers, can see all posts and other features.

🥳 Congratulations to every admin on this loud date! After all, channels are the most important update that turned the Messenger upside down forever!

🇲🇩 About a year ago, while I was stuck in Paris, the French intelligence services reached out to me through an intermediary, asking me to help the Moldovan government censor certain Telegram channels ahead of the presidential elections in Moldova.

After reviewing the channels flagged by French (and Moldovan) authorities, we identified a few that clearly violated our rules and removed them. The intermediary then informed me that, in exchange for this cooperation, French intelligence would “say good things” about me to the judge who had ordered my arrest in August last year.

This was unacceptable on several levels. If the agency did in fact approach the judge — it constituted an attempt to interfere in the judicial process. If it did not, and merely claimed to have done so, then it was exploiting my legal situation in France to influence political developments in Eastern Europe — a pattern we have also observed in Romania 🇷🇴

Shortly thereafter, the Telegram team received a second list of so-called “problematic” Moldovan channels. Unlike the first, nearly all of these channels were legitimate and fully compliant with our rules. Their only commonality was that they voiced political positions disliked by the French and Moldovan governments.

We refused to act on this request.

Telegram is committed to freedom of speech and will not remove content for political reasons. I will continue to expose every attempt to pressure Telegram into censoring our platform. Stay tuned. 🤝

— @durov