Well, Telegram has all of their phone numbers as PII, so sleep well knowing that your ideological opponents are self-owning themselves through fake privacy platforms.

Normally, I like privacy oriented apps. I use Signal when I can. Years ago, I heard telegram was good for android sharing of binaries that would unlock my bootloader, and used it for that. There were a few people in the group chat posting some suspicious links, but i ignored that. Then i explored it for pcb keycaps group, that was a smaller group. Tons of porn and suspicious links started to pop up in the chat. I felt I was one step removed from things I didn’t want to be a part of in any way.

I know this type of stuff probably happens on Signal and most other “privacy” oriented chat apps. I had this feeling on Telegram that it was part of the norm though. Like how cigarettes companies said they weren’t targeting young people but we all knew the messaging appealed to them. I never dug deep into this. I just bailed on Telegram and decided I didn’t want to participate. I’m sure lots of people use it for it’s intended use and I hope the owners/creators were not turning an obvious blind eye to evidence of evil foul play on their platform for the sake of the almighty dollar.

The New York Times which has had an op ed from Tom Cotton is center left? Interesting.