As always, context matters. SSL is clearly encryption, but if you talk about encrypted messaging, in this future year of 2024, people will assume that you mean end to end encryption. If it was 1996, this might be a different story, of course, but it's not.

Telegram really has kind of pulled off a masterstroke in marketing by convincing people that it is e2e encrypted (honestly, as a non-user I assumed that its non-group messaging was until the current fuss), while not being, even where it would be easy to be (non-group stuff). One might reasonably question their motives there.

In the sense that SSL in 2024 is the bare minimum and goes without saying, so when talking about encryption we mean e2ee.