Telegram: Which countries are clamping down on it and why?

Telegram is accused of promoting terrorism, selling illicit drugs, and more, but some claim it has also been essential in pro-democracy protests.

Telegram has gotten into trouble with governments worldwide, making a name for itself for spreading disinformation and enabling extremism.
Now, the app is again the target of harsh criticism after its co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov was detained near Paris over an investigation into alleged offences related to the messaging app, such as organised crime and drug trafficking.  
“Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe. It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” Telegram wrote in a blog post following the arrest.
The messaging app has already run into trouble in many countries, which have either banned or tried to crack down on Telegram due to similar concerns or because of government restrictions on media freedom. 
In total, 31 countries have banned the Telegram platform since 2015 either temporarily or permanently affecting more than 3 billion people globally, according to Surfshark and Netblocks. 
Here are some of the countries where Telegram has run into trouble. 
Most recently, Telegram was used to plan and coordinate anti-immigrant riots in the UK in early August.
It came after three girls were killed in northern England and Telegram channels were used by extremists to spread hatred against Muslims and share information about locations and targets for attacks. 
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he would clamp down on social media platforms that fanned the flames of unrest but no action has been taken so far against Telegram. 
Starmer called for “tough and effective sanctions” against the company in 2021.
Spaniards were briefly left without Telegram in March after a judge banned the app after four of the country’s main media groups – Mediaset, Atresmedia, Movistar, and Egeda – complained that the app was disseminating content generated by them and protected by copyright without authorisation from the creators.
The judge had asked Telegram to send certain information for the case in July 2023 and ordered the app to be blocked after the company did not respond. 
But the ruling was reversed after it was criticised as disproportionate and could cause damage to millions of users. 
The country sees the app as a possible threat to national security and in March 2023 banned both Telegram and TikTok for ministers, state secretaries, and political advisers on work devices. 
“In its open threat assessment ‘Focus 2023,’ the intelligence service points to Russia and China as the main threat actors against Norwegian security interests,” said justice minister Emilie Enger Mehl.
“They also point out that social media is a favourable arena for the actors who want to influence us through disinformation and fake news”. 
In 2022, Germany considered banning Telegram after the government found 64 channels potentially violated German laws against hate speech, such as antisemitic conspiracy channels.
Germany issued a €5 million fine against the operators of Telegram for failing to comply with German law.
Telegram said it agreed to cooperate with the German government and deleted those videos as well as those with potentially illegal content in the future.
Telegram has been the go-to communication app since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressing the country every day, and it being used on the frontlines of the battlefields for communication. 
It has also been used by Russians in search of information beyond the message from the Kremlin but also to spread disinformation and also potentially hack military groups. 
This has caused Ukraine to consider banning Telegram unless the company implements certain changes, such as having an office in Ukraine and removing harmful or false content or users.  
Russia briefly banned Telegram in 2018 for two years after co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov did not comply with requests to hand over information on certain users. 
But the ban did not make much of an impact and the app thrived as a source of news for many Russians. 
Despite the temporary ban, government departments such as the Russian Foreign Ministry and the national COVID-19 task force have official channels on Telegram.
Telegram was a key tool in Belarus for sharing information about anti-government protests in 2020 and 2021. It was one of the few social media apps that worked when the country blocked the Internet for three days during the presidential election.
Since the vote, Belarus has published a list of Telegram channels that are considered extremist and mainly anti-government. If users join them they risk up to seven years in prison, according to Amnesty International. 
Telegram has been blocked in China since 2015. Local media reported the app experienced a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on its server, which led to the app being censored. 
Some experts have said this could have been an attack by China to give a reason for it to block the app as human rights lawyers in China used it to criticise the government and Chinese Communist Party. 
Telegram has been blocked in Iran since 2018 following the protests that erupted a year earlier, which called for better economic justice in the country.
The government blamed Telegram for facilitating the protests and said local apps should be promoted. 
Before the ban, it was reported that half of Iran’s roughly 80 million population used Telegram to communicate but many still use the app by going through a virtual private network (VPN). 
Just one day after Durov’s arrest, India’s government said it was investigating Telegram over its alleged role in several criminal activities and would consider a ban pending the probe. 
The country has seen the app leak several exam papers and spread child pornography, stock price manipulation, and extortion.
In July, the country’s authorities uncovered a stock price manipulation scheme that saw the administrator of a Telegram channel receive more than €20,000 for manipulating the stock prices of a steel sheet manufacturing company.
“One of the most rampant scams on Telegram is investment fraud in which a user is added to a group and is suggested to invest their money in stocks on a fake application which mirrors a legitimate stock trading app,” a senior police officer from the Delhi Police cybercrime told local media. 
Telegram has been banned in Thailand since 2020 due to its use in anti-government protests the same year, which called for the resignation of former prime minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha, an ex-army chief who seized power in a 2014 coup. 
Telegram was used to organise protests at short notice.