
Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests - gamblor956
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-21/telegram-messaging-app-crucial-belarus-protests
======
diimdeep
Telegram created Belarus language public channel.

And posted poll to vote for new president with some clever restrictions.

Anyone can vote, but you can't choose options with candidates if your phone
number is not Balarusian.

"I am not from Belarus" is only available poll option to make your vote if
your phone number is not Balarusian. There is currently 736'000 votes with
that option.

Telegram poll
[https://t.me/s/telegrambelarus/9](https://t.me/s/telegrambelarus/9)

In Belarus there is only 7.8 million eligible voters.

Poll shows that 1,184 million choose to vote for new president Tikhanovskaya.

Only 85'000 votes for current president Lukashenko.

While official results is 80% for current, 7% for new, with 40% participation.

This is obviously mind blowing picture for citizens.

~~~
HPsquared
To be fair though, Telegram users aren't exactly an unbiased sample.

~~~
huhtenberg
2.3M voted in a poll, 59% from Belorussian phone numbers. That's 1.36 M or 17%
of the eligible voter pool. 51% of these are for the secondary candidate.

This doesn't reconcile with the official numbers regardless of how you massage
them.

~~~
d0mine
Sample size is not everything "Literary Digest poll was also one of the
largest and most expensive polls ever conducted, with a sample size of around
2.4 million people" The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness
[https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...](https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.html)

~~~
nordsieck
> The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness

That's true for "reasonable" poll sizes. As your poll size increases past a
certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness.

An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.

~~~
Alupis
What we have here is a Sample, and in statistics (of which Polling is a
discipline) you require a Randomized Sample of the Population before you can
draw any meaningful conclusions.

Telegram users are not going to pass any "Randomness" scrutiny. For all we
know, Telegram User A asks Telegram User B to take the poll, etc. That's not
random, and can introduce all sorts of statistical bias.

~~~
lrem
What kind of a statistical bias would explain having 1 million Belariusian
phone numbers claiming having voted for a candidate, that officially received
around 0.5 million votes total?

~~~
brain5ide
Adulthood necessary to vote could be one?

------
newscracker
It's not surprising that every time Telegram pops up here, many comments miss
the fact that Telegram has a great UX, a great feature set and also provides
the kind of privacy protestors value, i.e., not having their phone numbers
flashed to every random stranger in groups or to random channel owners whose
channels you've subscribed to. With Telegram you cannot even do a phone number
enumeration attack (this can be changed in settings) by adding phone numbers
to your contacts list to find out who's using it.

And nope, Signal doesn't make the cut for the above reasons because it exposes
your phone number to everyone else. WhatsApp is the same in this respect.
Neither of them prevent enumeration attacks (they may slow that down a bit,
but not sufficient enough to protect against state actors).

Wire and Element (Matrix) are comparatively better than Telegram, Signal and
WhatsApp because you don't need a phone number to sign up and they also have
end to end encryption for all chats (with Element it's a bit more recent).
Hopefully more people can soon ditch phone number based apps that cause them
to be vulnerable because of that vector.

~~~
maqp
" _And nope, Signal doesn 't make the cut for the above reasons because it
exposes your phone number to everyone else_"

This is being worked on.

The thing is you're mixing two threat models. One is a creepy dude who will
give you nightly calls if they learn your phone number. The other is a state
actor who will hack the server and track you based on your IP-address if no
phone number is being used otherwise: hence the enumeration attacks won't
matter. You can't escape state actors looking at your metadata with Wire,
Element or Signal. For that you want an Onion Service based system like Briar,
Cwtch, Ricochet, or TFC.

For the creepy people not having to hand out your phone number is a nicety,
but it's not at all hard to block a phone number either, it works just like
any other app's blacklist: just add the number and be done with it.

~~~
bobwernstein
phone numbers are shared in groups with tens of thousands of people. They
spam, herass, hack etc. Forcing you to change your number.

~~~
maqp
Ah yes, the classic hacking someone with their phone number!

~~~
r3muxd
yes? just knowing a phone number is enough to log into a non-2fa google
account if you know the pass, plus it can be easily triangulated to a real-
world address

~~~
bobwernstein
exactly. And not only that, people who work at telecom providers sell illegal
services to whoever wants to pay. They give you access to anyones numbers for
money.

------
prajjwal
It's amazing that technology is empowering these protestors, but I'm not sure
a vulnerable group of people such as this should be leaving identifying
information on these servers.

\- You cannot sign up for Telegram without your phone number (even if it isn't
public). \- End to End encryption exists but is limited to 1-1 chats. \-
Telegram cooperates with data requests from law enforcements.

The kind of risk this puts them in cannot be overstated.

~~~
eitland
> Telegram cooperates with data requests from law enforcements.

It is not that black and white:

AFAIK and IIRC it is more like this:

\- yes: Telegram gives data about members of public groups/channels

\- no: Telegram does not give out information from closed groups / personal
chats, and they go to great lengths to prevent that information from becoming
available. We might be sceptical all we want about the custom crypto, but I've
seen no credible source that I can think of that have backs you statement
except the limited example I gave above.

Happy to learn more though.

~~~
maqp
"they go to great lengths to prevent that information from becoming
available."

Where's the documentation for this? Without documentation your assumption that
there's any security is just blind faith.

~~~
jitbit
Telegram has been sued over and over in many countries for refusing to provide
that info, and kept fighting (both legally and technologically - via smart
proxy-server rotation, addresses distributed over Apples/Google's push
notifications etc.).

Here's the case for Russia -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia)
(eventually the govt has blocked over 20 million (!) IP addresses, including
Google's and Cloudflare's, and that disrupted 30% of the Internet in the
country, but the app just kept working fine)

~~~
maqp
Schneier was very vocal after the Snowden documents on how the NSA has
multiple methods to get hold of the data. If it's not via judicial means, it's
via extra-judicial means. NSA considers Telegram's servers outside US fair
game (i.e. hacking them is not a problem). GCHQ considers servers inside the
US fair game. The two agencies exchange intel which allows them to bypass
constitutional protections. This is old news.

As for Russia, China, Israel etc. The servers are outside their borders, and
mostly they don't give a flying fuck even if it was domestically hosted.

------
rectang
Should the revolution fail, the digital trail left by these messages will give
the government everything they need to hunt down every last activist.

We saw it with the Green Revolution in Iran. We've seen it several times
since.

So long as messages are not encrypted, messaging apps are much more naturally
suited as tools of oppression than tools of revolution.

~~~
mbowcutt
I don't know too much about Telegram but isn't it encrypted?

~~~
input_sh
By default it's no more encrypted than HN (as in, traffic to their servers
uses TLS, messages on the server are not encrypted at all).

There's Secret Chats feature which they claim to be end-to-end encrypted,
meaning that it's no more secure than Facebook's Messenger (also end-to-end
encrypted in Secret Conversations). Even less so considering that they roll
their own encryption (MTProto), while Facebook's Messenger uses Signal's
protocol.

Further info (which will also lead you to problems with their MTProto
protocol, if you're interested):
[https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-
telegr...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram-
secure)

~~~
ConsiderCrying
Can we stop using 6-year-old info for apps that get updated monthly? The
problems they have with MTProto have been patched literally 5 years ago, the
only other criticism comes from a direct competitor, and they recommend
WhatsApp despite the fact that it's closed-source and nobody can verify if its
encryption truly works.

Facebook is planning to merge Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which makes
it even more awful of a choice.

~~~
heinrich5991
Telegram still doesn't encrypt chats end to end (by default¹), which means
it's not a strictly superior choice to WhatsApp.

Facebook can't read your WhatsApp messages (of course they can add an update
any time to do that), but Telegram has access to all your messages _right
now_.

¹ Yes, you can select the end-to-end encrypted sessions, but they're very
crippled from a usability perspective. I don't remember the last time anyone
used it with me, yet all my chats on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted without
anyone doing anything.

~~~
ConsiderCrying
> Facebook can't read your WhatsApp messages

Are we sure it can't? Because WhatsApp is closed-source, its GDrive backups
are unencrypted and Facebook's whole profit model is based around snooping.
Unless they make the app open-source, I'm not trusting them even with a
grocery list. People act like E2E is the be-all and end-all but trusting an
incredibly shady company on its word is not something I'm comfortable with.

~~~
heinrich5991
Yes, people are reverse engineering the app. You can check the discussions on
HackerNews when security of WhatsApp is discussed.

GDrive backups are not readable by Facebook, they're readable by Google. End-
to-end, if properly implemented is the be-all and end-all. Except for
metadata, which is a problem, but a different one, and Facebook definitely
abuses that. But they don't/can't read the contents of chat messages (for
now).

It's not merely trusting that shady company, but also realizing that the news
of FB not having E2E-encrypted messages would definitely make the news, you'd
be aware of it.

~~~
shawnz
> It's not merely trusting that shady company, but also realizing that the
> news of FB not having E2E-encrypted messages would definitely make the news,
> you'd be aware of it.

Right.. consider what your adversary would be giving up by revealing such a
secret, even if it was true. That alone provides a not-insubstantial amount of
security.

------
myth_drannon
There was also a very large Telegram channel where they were doxing riot
police members that were participating in attacks on demonstrators. It was
extremely efficient infowar since it was their home addresses, family photos,
wife's cellphone number...

~~~
RangerScience
Wait seriously? Where can I find out more?

~~~
myth_drannon
[https://t.me/terroristybelarusi](https://t.me/terroristybelarusi)

~~~
sam_lowry_
This is the biggest, but there are also others.

~~~
CryptoBanker
Shittier than perpetuating violence on demonstrators?

------
democracy
Actually there are reports that riot police was specifically looking at ones
telegram channels to decide on the degree of your immediate punishment (yes,
old school batons). And it was easily decrypted (phone unlocked) with a threat
by the cops. I am in Belarus at the moment and can confirm telegram was not
available without vpns/proxy just like any other resource. And why wouldn't it
be?

~~~
sam_lowry_
This is why many protesters had kill swithes on their devices to whipe them
out in case they are arrested.

~~~
democracy
...most of the detained people didn't have such switches and it's not easy to
use it - just look at how quickly people get arrested - it happens within
seconds, hardly enough time to even take the phone out of your pocket and
unlock it.

~~~
newsbinator
Also they don't know they're about to be arrested. One second they're walking
along a street, one of dozens of other random pedestrians, the next second six
guys are literally carrying them into a van.

~~~
sam_lowry_
The kill switch is used to wipe the phone when the pin is extorted from the
protester. Enter a kill pin once and bye-bye.

~~~
maqp
Source on this "kill switch"?

------
ThinkBeat
The encryption is not very good in group chat.

All the security services need is to find one protesters phone force the
person to unlock it and they have it all.

I am sure all network traffic of any kind was heavily monitored too.

It also becomes entirely useless when the authority turns off the internet.

There is another one that can work with a Bluetooth mesh
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsi...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/09/02/hong-
kong-protestors-using-mesh-messaging-app-china-cant-block-usage-up-3685/amp/)

That Bluetooth is easy to notice and I’m the past was easy to listen in on. I
presume that is better now.

~~~
newscracker
> All the security services need is to find one protesters phone force the
> person to unlock it and they have it all.

This is true for all apps regardless of how good their network encryption is.
With Telegram it's possible to delete messages for everyone. Not so in some
other apps.

~~~
maqp
"With Telegram it's possible to delete messages for everyone"

If the phone is in airplane mode, or faraday bag it's not receiving any
"delete message" commands.

Also, with Telegram the case is, when the Belarusian, Russian, Chinese,
Israeli, US... intelligence agency compromises the server, they can see every
group message of every group, because by design Telegram's group chats never
use E2EE.

Every cryptographer agrees Telegram's encryption is shit. Let's start
believing them.

------
paganel
Similar thing is happening in the States with different social media platforms
(FB, Reddit until recently) which have empowered political views not reguarded
as “good” by the mainstream media, but you don’t see congratulatory articles
about this phenomenon, with FB even seen as Satan itself when it comes to
politics.

~~~
dmurray
A different interpretation is that those social media platforms keep the
dissent monitorable and under control, and the powers that be are quite happy
with the status quo. If that was the case, as soon as a platform that was not
US-controlled gained a foothold in the US, we'd see a crackdown from the
establishment. It would be painted as a tool of a foreign power and shut down
or forced to be turned over to a US-based entity.

If that ever happens, we'll know democracy in the US is under threat.

~~~
ROARosen
> as soon as a platform that was not US-controlled gained a foothold in the
> US, we'd see a crackdown from the establishment

Telegram is not US controlled. There is no crackdown from the "establishment".
Except if you meant only in situations where there is widespread unrest? If it
is not relevant to Facebook here in the US in the first place.

~~~
newen
3.5 million monthly active users of Telegram in the US. 80 million MAU of
TikTok in the US. Makes a difference. They didn't crack down on TikTok until
very recently.

------
AcerbicZero
What was the revolutionary app during the Ukrainian protests? I remember
reading almost the exact same article at that time, although then I was a
little distracted because that revolutionairy app ended with Russia annexing
Crimea. Guess that wasn't in the TOS?

------
nikivi
Very curious how Telegram plans to monetize the app eventually given their
crypto thing didn't work out.

~~~
outime
Compared to WhatsApp, they do have access to all messages from every person
(except for the few people using secret chats) and group so I'd not be very
surprised if they started to mine that data somehow if they really want the
money.

~~~
eitland
Compared to WhatsApp that is owned by a massive megacorp that bought it for
over $10bn and that has already tried to start mining metadata from it I would
say Telegram still has its advantages.

(FWIW: I prefer Signal.)

~~~
mbdesign
Prefer Signal myself too. It's a bit hard to switch over from WhatsApp and
tried to use it at least with my spouse. One feature that Telegram and
WhatsApp miss, is being able to send yourself a message. On Signal you can do
this and it's very convenient for taking notes, sending passwords (laptop
<\--> phone) and for saving bookmarks. I used to share interesting bookmarks
from HN to my email, but that quickly got cumbersome to sort out.

~~~
csydas
Telegram has the saved messages chat which is a chat with yourself.

~~~
eitland
Agreed. This actually works incredibly well on Telegram to sync snippets and
files between devices.

FWIW you can also create multiple groups with the same person(s) so you can
keep one "group" chat with your spouse for chores, shopping lists etc and
another for photos of the kids, birthday planning, funny stuff etc.

This probably works in most messengers though, but it is a nice hack anyway.

------
dalbasal
It's disappointing that this kind of thing is possible in relation to the
sophistication and competence of a regime.

Or maybe I should say that 2020 is a disappointment, from a 2005 perspective.
The internet was supposed to be free. The ability to use it for political
change democratically was supposed to be built in, innate.

This wasn't supposed to be a rare and fortunate blip, a soon-to-be-closed
loophole in an app that . Internal security office around the world are
currently reviewing their susceptibility to Telegram-based "attacks."

Even in democratic countries, we're increasingly seeing the internet's ability
to lead to political organizing as dubious... something that must be
controlled.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
I'm surprised that Telegram is proudly proclaiming itself to be sponsoring
regime change in a foreign country. Seems kinda... gauche? I mean, that's
still frowned upon right? Is my mindset antiquated?

------
throwawaynow716
Relatively long time Signal user (2+ years) from Belarus. Was in the city when
internet blackout arrived.

I don't want to waste your time on how i moved 30 people to Signal and
preached about security and signal being the best pick on the market. Hell,
even my family is on Signal.

Now, let me tell you this. The `anti censorship switch` did not work during
the internet hiccup. In a moment all that fancy stuff just ended up being....
useless.

So check this out, i have family members living outside Belarus, they have
Signal installed. But i am not able to message quite blatantly simple phrase
"i am all right!".

Next thing happened i fired up Telegram, hooked up SOCKS5 proxy and was
capable to reach out my family members and asked friends to go on Twitter and
get @signalapp's attention same evening outage started. Zero reaction.

Signal was and is dead silent. This makes me think that, come on, people
Signal caters to the USA users only. They won't care for others. Moxxie
denouncing american police for their brutality, you've been to Chernobyl, you
know what Eastern bloc looks like. Guys over here are three times more fierce
than yours. But your company somehow makes a statement to accommodate local
protesters, now what have you done to aid anything outside of cozy California?

Lesson i've learned, that on the verge of something Belarus experienced last
week, Signal has zero value.

I even own the debug logs to send 'em so they will figure why the censorship
circumvention wasn't working, but i'm drop dead sure i won't hear from them.
Not being a hothead to get rid of Signal straight away but definitely i have
to tell you my trust in Telegram's resilience grown

------
mcsoft
It's surprising how Telegram successfully lured public to believe it is a
secure messaging app while not providing end-to-end encryption by default.

You need to explicitly start secret chat (under More button on the contact
page) to opt-in for E2EE, something you get by default in every Whatsapp chat.

------
aborsy
Why not Signal? It’s the way to go as far as messaging apps are concerned.

~~~
zanny
Matrix has comprehensive encryption now _and_ is decentralized.

~~~
robertfw
Matrix really does seem like the ideal future platform to build on, I've
started poking around it and really like what I see. Does anyone with more
experience want to chime in on what they've found using it?

~~~
tryptophan
It has the best protocol I'd say, but other than that everything else is
worse.

All the clients suck, features are missing/buggy, nobody is sure if it is
supposed to be a discord/slack or whataspp replacement, giving a half-ass
implementation of both, and confusing to users security stuff(asks random
users about their keys).

That being said, I still love the project and hope they sort out their UX
problems.

~~~
thekyle
I really like the idea of Matrix, but in practice I don't have anyone to use
it with. At least with Signal the on-boarding experience is super low
friction, so I can just tell someone "message me on Signal" and they'll figure
it out.

Matrix on-boarding is more complicated and would probably require hand holding
through which client and server to use.

------
InnocentAsks
About 9 months ago, Iranian government shutted off the internet amid protests.
telegram is the most popular messenger among the Iranians. But it didn't work
then and was disconnected, like all other services. only sites and services
which had their servers inside Iran could continue their normal functions. my
question is, what is the difference between internet shut off in Iran, and
Belarus? Could telegram stay available in Iran, but didn't bother to?

------
kozak
Considering that the app has been created by Russians (albeit ones who claim
to oppose the current government of Russia), and it is popular mostly in
countries that surround Russia, this is not surprising at all that it's the
default choice for young people in Belarus. Telegram is a strong indicator of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_world)
these days.

~~~
chromedev
You forget to mention the desktop and mobile apps both are open source, so
anyone can build their own network.

~~~
kozak
I have never seen anyone actually doing that. The popularity of Telegram
consists 100% of the popularity of its own network.

~~~
chromedev
If for some reason they were caught doing something worthy of changing the
network, then I could see it happening. With their recent addition of video
messaging, they pretty much have the best messenger app to date.

------
exabrial
Telegram needs a p2p mode via wifi or bluetooth. If the government forces an
outage or implements a great firewall, they'd be dead in the water.

~~~
Krasnol
I bet it'll never happen for the same reason Durov holds on to the servers and
their code so tightly.

------
dirtnugget
Still don’t trust them. Loads of shady things, from them rolling their own
encryption to the fact, that is not possible to encrypt group chats.

IMHO red flags. However I still have not encountered a messaging app which
does group chats with somewhat complete feature set in groups.

Signal won’t let you moderate groups for example. (No admin role where you can
ban somebody or delete messages)

~~~
maqp
Signal is working on V2 groups with moderation right now.

------
x87678r
Wasn't Telegram restricted in Russia? I'm surprised Belarus can't turn it off
whenever it wants as well.

~~~
iillexial
They tried to block it but didn't really succeed. It continued working
although with some glitches.

~~~
nitrogen
If any technical details of that block and why it failed emerge, they would be
fascinating reading. It also kind of makes one wonder if there's a non-
technical reason why blocking it failed.

~~~
SXX
Real reason is simple: Russian government never actually tried to block it for
real. Kremlin could easily force Apple and Google to block the application
itself or it's push notification for Russian users, but they never did that.

Of course there was a lot of technical shenanigans going to block their IP
addresses and proxy servers, but everyone understood that's is very fruitless
attempt.

Oh and they fully unblocked it when Durov's TON network was destroyed by SEC
in the US. Very soon after event Telegram official representative went to
Kremlin and poof: Telegram is unblocked.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Sour grapes much?

They have asked Apple and Google to remove Telegram from appstore. -
[https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17406178/russia-
telegram-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17406178/russia-telegram-
apple-app-store-censorship)

Thousands of essential services have stopped working and internet in the
country came to a standstill for days. Many were pissed off and loosing money,
including folks working for the government, so it was not tenable to continue.

Do you have any proof for the Kremlin visit is it as unsubstantiated as the
rest of your post?

~~~
SXX
The point is: they never went through with this. They could easily pressure
Google / Apple to comply, but they didn't. China pressured Apple to remove all
kind of apps so it's very much doable.

    
    
        > Thousands of essential services have stopped working and internet in the country came to a standstill for days. Many were pissed off and loosing money, including folks working for the government, so it was not tenable to continue.
    

They banned tons of IP subnets, but that's all. If they actually wanted Google
/ Apple to remove the app they could easily use different ways for that: e.g
blocking Google Ads income, or making Apple / Google Pay services unlawful.

    
    
       > Do you have any proof for the Kremlin visit is it as unsubstantiated as the rest of your post?
    

Vice president of the company was participating IT industry meeting with
premier minister of Russia:

[https://www.rbc.ru/business/10/07/2020/5f08406a9a7947867c1d9...](https://www.rbc.ru/business/10/07/2020/5f08406a9a7947867c1d9ce0)

------
vasu_man
For a country ruled by a 'dictator', I'm surprised the Belarus' government
hasn't blocked access to Telegram yet. Non-authoritarian democracies (well, at
least on paper) such as Brazil and India, in past, have blocked WhatsApp to
contain protests and spread of (mis)information.

~~~
samat
Telegram is notorious for censorship circumvention. They have successfully
defeated such an attempt to block telegram by Russian government. Russia used
sophisticated DPI, nuked substantial portions of AWS and Cloudflare IP subnets
for Russian users and still failed. This guys know how to do censorship
circumvention and they are motivated.

~~~
wruza
Telegram was inaccessible or unreliable for many users after the first block.
For a while we used third-party vpn services (these in turn grew like
mushrooms after a rain of previous website blocks — e.g. rutracker for drm
violations, pornsites for cp, and vue.js for its extremist nature). Then tg
implemented proxy switching over socks or something, which is
indistinguishable from a regular ssl and could be set up in minutes by anyone.
In last years you could use it without any setting, out of the box (but not
the web client, which still required a vpn for obvious reasons).

Russia basically trained tg and more importantly it's users to work this way
to the extent when further blocking would harm the network infrastructure
itself.

------
neonate
[https://archive.is/jbbmQ](https://archive.is/jbbmQ)

------
avodonosov
I'm not sure how crucial it is. The main news portal tut.by is also fueling
protests.

~~~
hippich
Tut.by was down during 9-10 events, while telegram appeared to work with some
kind of VPN workaround (Belarusian, but living in the USA)

~~~
avodonosov
In Beltelecom network when using Opera browser VPN I read tut.by. In A1
network Opera VPN didn't help.

Actually, availability at 9-10 does not really matter, people were already
intended to protest by that time.

~~~
avodonosov
I mean people were going to protest already

------
LockAndLol
> authorities shut off the internet, leaving Belarusians with almost no access
> to independent online news outlets or social media and protesters seemingly
> without a leader

How are they using Telegram without internet?

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
The one thing I did not see in article or comments is that Telegram will have
a bigger target on its back. Governments are not fond of communication
channels they are unable to control.

------
dschuetz
I really hope the people of Belarus get the government they deserve.

------
ur-whale
[http://archive.is/wip/OhtsY](http://archive.is/wip/OhtsY)

------
trurl123
We are using Telegram every day for a work and private life. This is the best
messenger in the world.

------
soufron
It's never "the work of a long-preparing revolutionnary crowd" revolution, but
always a "latest fashionable technology" revolution.

Tech propaganda at its best.

~~~
75dvtwin
@soufron, I agree with you. It is shameful, to call uprising of suppressed --
against systemic unfairness -- as 'Telegram revolution'.

This is akin to stealing valor (basically stealing medals and pretending to be
the honorable).

This type of valor stealing, is also happening when people call US border
detention facilities as 'Nazi concentration camps'. For people whose family
members went through a Nazi concentration camp, hearing such a comparing is
painful.

For Byelorussians whose livers and kidneys were raptured by the beatings,
whose loved ones are imprisoned -- hearing Telegram marketing spin is painful,
like when their valor, their sacrifice is stolen.

Yes of course, without recording technology, in my view, we would not have
successful type of investigative journalism that project Veritas has
delivered.

Or, without cell phones, the ability of people of Belarus to share images of
brutality with the world.

Technology, is helping to concentrate the will power of the masses, against
well funded machines of system oppressions.

But the will of the people, their sacrifices, their sufferings -- is the
driving force -- not Telegram

~~~
brosinante
Calling a detention facility a Nazi concentration camp is not the same as
calling a grassroots effort a "telegram revolution". One is making an analogy
to history, the other is using a vapid phrase to market a mobile app.

~~~
bdamm
"The medium is the message"

In fact it is a Telegram revolution, because Telegram is the tool that is
allowing this rage to become organized. That doesn't minimize anything about
the protesting or the political situation itself. That's not marketing, it's
just recognizing the tool.

------
throwaway4747l
Ctrl-F "Signаl": 10 instances

Seriously, it'd be nice if we could have _one_ thread about Telegram without
S-advocates showing up and complaining about "security". Yes, we know Telegram
isn't as secure, yadda yadda yadda. Now if only Signal provided _half_ the
features Telegram does, maybe non-cryptonerds would have heard of it.

~~~
maccam912
Yeah honestly I just scroll right past them. I use telegram for my "Can you
pick up some bananas on the way home?" messages. If I ever had a confidential
tip for some investigative journalist I'd use signal. But it gets annoying if
every post with the word "telegram" in the title gets the same "But signal is
more secure!" response unrelated to the content of the article.

~~~
newen
Doesn't Signal give out your phone number to whoever you message?

~~~
maqp
Both sender and recipient need to have each other in contacts to message one
another.

------
jacobwilliamroy
When Facebook does it over here it's called "Cyber war"

When Telegram does it over there it's called "Liberation"

------
biscotti
The Belarus protests work to unseat a President who resisted bribes to impose
a strict lockdown. Lukashenko was offered a sum of USD 940M, initially by the
WHO & raised by the World Bank.

It’s a foreign led insurrection that we should all oppose. That people in this
thread label it a revolution just goes to show how easily truth can be
perverted.

Seems to me he’s a threat to their Corona agenda, that's why he must go.

------
throwaway12992
I find myself surprised that such a large percentage of people use Telegram in
Belarus.

One might wonder if perhaps some government who wanted nukes on Russia's
border might expend some effort into discrediting an election of somebody who
was blocking that objective.

Telegram accounts can be made in an automated manner, for somebody
sufficiently motivated.

[https://social.techjunkie.com/use-telegram-without-phone-
num...](https://social.techjunkie.com/use-telegram-without-phone-number/)

[https://www.voiplid.com/belarus-did-virtual-phone-
number/](https://www.voiplid.com/belarus-did-virtual-phone-number/)

~~~
danvayn
That's a reasonable concern, but considering Belarus has had problems like
these for a while, and given telegram's popularity, both as a messenger and as
a tool to circumvent Big Brother, I'd say that the majority of those
Belarusian accounts are legitimate.

