The report suggests otherwise.
The report argues the ability of abuse sites on Telegram to generate advertising and revenue means that “it is not in the platform’s interest to proactively and aggressively moderate content.”
Telegram’s premium subscriptions generated $292 million, with the subscriber base growing to 15 million by May 2025.
Moreover, these groups are not E2EE, which means Telegram can see what goes on in there and hence has more power to do something about it. In his latest interview on a German podcast, Proton’s CEO talked about Telegram and its founder Pavel Durov.
Yen described Telegram’s attitude towards legal requests as “F the Police”. What Yen meant by this is that Telegram has a history of ignoring legal requests, which I believe is documented. They may be more collaborative now, but they are still not transparent with users or in their marketing.
If Signal had channels and allowed groups larger than 1000, they would likely have the same problem as Telegram. But they don’t, and I believe that was a smart decision, even though I am not against large group platforms being E2EE.
The other difference between Signal and Telegram is that Signal does not ignore legal requests.
All the people who use Telegram or any service to abuse and exploit women and children, deserve to get caught. But if bad laws are proposed in response to Telegram’s lax attitude toward abuse taking place on their platform, we could soon have another chat control.