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Comment by neverrroot | Hacker News Reader

On the surface you are correct, this is especially the painted picture by the mass media and at least partially by the government (who also sought banning Telegram entirely in Germany). If you go deeper, you get to see that also a lot of human rights activists and NGOs are using it. Have been using Telegram since 2015, and in the meantime, most of my IT buddies use it and/or Signal.

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With the invasion of Ukraine it seems like 95 % of the information out of Ukraine flows through Telegram (I'm not a user myself but the watermark and screenshots of the app are everywhere).

Telegram also has some ~700 million monthly active users - it seems unlikely to me that there are even 700 million alt-right people in the entire world.

It’s not and everyone knows it, including those arguing against it. The really painful thing is, Germany still has a right problem. They can be found everywhere, including in police, military, political system, media etc. Multiple scandals offer evidence, but the daily life also shows stuff not covered by this. But this situation and widespread knowledge of this is also used in order to intimidate the others, that are not on the right at all. And this is not only a reality in Germany, unfortunately.

Ukrainian here. Almost 100% of war videos goes through Telegram, possibly because Youtube does not like videos with blood and murders, and 0% goes from something like torrents or self-hosted.

Yes, I agree that the reports on Telegram are mostly focused on right wing groups. I think that it's in ins very own nature that if there is a space for non conforming right wing ideas, there is also a space for other ideas that do not fit particularly well into the mainstream opinion. I would consider human rights activism and some work of NGOs as at least unpleasant for the government which would be a good reason to pay attention on where the communication happens.

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