Like most of the “encrypted” chat apps, TG was mostly not E2E encrypted, meaning TG or whoever has access to its servers could read everything. Plus there is probably a backdoor which allows the E2E messages to be cracked by whoever wrote the code.

Mr Durov is now blocked from leaving France, and may be forever. Effectively France has seized control of the TG. What they will do with it is unclear.

Maybe TG will follow a similar fate to Reddit. Founder Aaron Swartz pushed to suicide by the capitalist dictatorship. Reddit later blamed for everything wrong with the USA and forced to ban most of its users.

TG most likely was already compromised long ago. Its based in UAE, a regime subject to USA influence, and probably already has backdoors and/or NSA monitoring. Founder is probably some sort of Westaboo or lolbert.

Most of TG is not encrypted anyway and is no more private than Twitter which many users had previously been on. I note they recently added E2E encryption for some “Secret chats”, but keep in mind that metadata cannot be encrypted. If it is true that Russia’s military is using it, they are very foolish to do so.

On the censorship thing, apparently they have already banned many groups after threats of legal action.