Telegram, Please Learn Who's a Threat and Who's Not

Telegram markets itself as a privacy-focused, anti-censorship messaging platform. With 1 billion monthly users as of March 2025, the app explicitly refuses "politically motivated censorship" and claims to have disclosed zero bytes of user data to governments.

Many people globally trust Telegram precisely because of these promises, believing their communications won't be snooped on, their data won't be sold to the highest bidder, and that they can speak freely without arbitrary censorship.

But after CEO Pavel Durov's arrest in France and mounting regulatory pressure, things have changed. The platform has aggressively ramped up enforcement, blocking over 29.2 million groups and channels in 2025 alone.

The problem? Overzealous enforcement that punishes victims alongside perpetrators.

No Answer is An Answer?

We used to have a pretty active Telegram group called "It's FOSS Community", not to be confused with our Discourse forum, which was linked to our channel. It had over 250 members, and the discussion that happened there was purely surrounding open source, Linux, and DIY, with some politics sprinkled here and there.

It disappeared overnight without any notice from Telegram. We realized this on October 8, 2025, the day after, when Shivam from our community management team notified us.

After some digging around, we found this message from "Spam Info Bot" informing us that some users had flagged our content as illegal.

Illegal? I mean, of all kinds of stuff that goes on Telegram, discussion about free and open source software is illegal? This is my guess that perhaps their automated system flagged 'free software' as in 'free download of pirated software.' But that's just my guess.

We contacted Telegram regarding this, bringing up the issue and highlighting how we, It's FOSS, are a trusted name in the Linux and open source space, but as of October 14, 2025, there has been no reply from their side.

A few months before this, we had received a message from "Abuse Notifications", Telegram's official account for handling abuse, that a message was blocked on our group because it violated the Telegram Terms of Service.

This goes without saying, but that message was posted by a bot, and if it were reported by a member or had we seen it soon after it was posted, we could've handled it.

And before you go on to tell us that "maybe your house wasn't as clean as you thought", let me clarify a few things: we had implemented MissRose, a popular group management bot, for automating moderation duties and had enabled the new joinee CAPTCHA verification system to deter bots. That didn't really work perfectly, as the bots would always manage to make their way in and post repetitive scam/phishing messages.

And, in the later stages, these bots (with OF-style profiles) got clever and just started adding random emoji reactions to our channel posts instead of posting those cheesy "we can help you" messages.

Among the 250+ active users, most of them were genuine humans who had joined our community to discuss Linux and open source, and while there were a few bot accounts in there, we tried our best to weed them out whenever we came across those.

Deja vu

This episode also reminds me of the incident when Facebook was banning links from Linux websites.

Everything is Spam on Facebook Unless It is Paid Post (or Actual Spam)

Linux websites are getting ill-treatment by Facebook.

It's FOSS NewsAbhishek

They were termed as cybersecurity problems and spam. After media outrage, Facebook was forced to change this atrocious behavior. Bringing the issue into public helps, and that's why we decided to publish this rant.

Now, The Bigger Question

Shouldn't Telegram be doing something about this bot epidemic that their platform has? Or is it that only the group members and the moderators are the ones who deserve to be punished like this?

You know what I think? The group must've been mass reported by bots, and combined with the idiotic scam and phishing bots that showed up regularly, Telegram's automated system just banned us without any accountability whatsoever.

And we're not alone. There's plenty of proof that this happens to people on Telegram. This Reddit post shows others getting restricted for no reason, and the comments are full of similar stories.

We have groups doing everything right and still getting wiped out because Telegram can't tell the difference between a community under attack and a community that's actually the problem.

**End of Rant**