“There you were, sitting there, writing to your friends in the chat room,” she recalls him saying. He proceeded to dispassionately quote word for word several Telegram messages she had written from her bed. “‘They’re unlikely to bust it down,’” he recited.

“And so,” he said, “we knew that you were there.”

Matsapulina was speechless. She tried to hide her shock, hoping to learn more about how they’d accessed her messages. But the officer didn’t elaborate.

When she was released two days later, Matsapulina learned from her lawyer that on the morning she was arrested, police had searched the houses of some 80 other people with opposition ties and had arrested 20, charging each with terrorism related to the alleged bomb threat. A few days later, Matsapulina gathered her belongings and boarded a flight to Istanbul.

In April, after having made it safely to Armenia, Matsapulina recounted the episode in a Twitter thread. She ruled out the chance that anyone in her close-knit group had been cooperating with security forces (they’d all also left Russia by then), which left two conceivable explanations for how the officers had read her private Telegram messages. One was that they had installed some kind of malware, like the NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus tool, on her phone. Based on what she’d gathered, the expensive software was reserved for high-level targets and was not likely to have been turned on a mid-level figure in an unregistered party with about 1,000 members nationwide.

The other “unpleasant” explanation, she wrote, “is, I think, obvious to everyone.” Russians needed to consider the possibility that Telegram, the supposedly antiauthoritarian app cofounded by the mercurial Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, was now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests. Telegram would later posit a third possible explanation: That in the few hours after Matsapulina’s arrest and before she was questioned, FSB officers had extracted her messages using a phone-hacking tool like Cellebrite.

Matsapulina’s case is hardly an isolated one, though it is especially unsettling. Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping. These cases have set off a swirl of conspiracy theories, paranoia, and speculation among dissidents, whose trust in Telegram has plummeted. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what’s really happening to people’s accounts—whether spyware or Kremlin informants have been used to break in, through no particular fault of the company; whether Telegram really is cooperating with Moscow; or whether it’s such an inherently unsafe platform that the latter is merely what appears to be going on.

In the decade since its founding in Russia, Telegram has grown to become one of the biggest social networks in the world, with 700 million users—yet only about 60 core employees. “For us, Telegram is an idea,” Durov has said. “It is the idea that everyone on this planet has a right to be free.”

The platform, now based in Dubai, has minimal content moderation aside from a stated commitment to taking down illegal pornography, IP rights violations, scams, and calls for violence. Often described in the press as an “encrypted” or “secure” messaging app, Telegram has fashioned itself as a refuge for safe, anonymous communication, but in fact it requires users to go out of their way to set a chat as “secret”; unlike on WhatsApp or Signal, end-to-end encryption is not the default. Still, Durov has repeatedly managed to benefit from the stumbles of other tech giants, particularly when user privacy is at stake. In January 2021, a PR crisis surrounding WhatsApp’s data-sharing with Facebook helped drive millions of people to Telegram, an exodus Durov called possibly the “largest digital migration in human history.”

In the US, Telegram has been relatively slow to catch on, though in the wake of Donald Trump’s ban from Facebook and Twitter in January 2021, it has increasingly become a hotbed for far-right groups like the Proud Boys and followers of QAnon. But in many parts of the world, Telegram is mainstream. In Brazil, where the app has been downloaded on more than half of the country’s smartphones, much of the January 2023 insurrection was planned on the platform. Telegram has also been crucial for pro-­democracy activists in Hong Kong and in countries under Russia’s thumb, like Belarus and Ukraine. In the latter, it has become the preferred app for disseminating government advice for avoiding air strikes—as well as for Russian disinformation.

But it is in Russia itself that Telegram has become nearly indispensable over the past year, thanks to the Putin regime’s wartime clampdown against Western tech. Since the conflict began, Russian authorities have branded Telegram’s main rival, Meta, an “extremist” organization, in part for permitting certain users in Ukraine to post calls for violence against the Russian military. Russia then blocked Meta’s Facebook (which had some 70 million users in the country) and Instagram (80 million). Telegram’s Russian user base has soared from 30 million in 2020 to nearly 50 million today, surpassing WhatsApp as Russia’s most used messaging platform. (The Kremlin controls all of the most popular internet companies based in Russia, including ­VKontakte, a ­Facebook-like social network cofounded by Durov in 2006 that has nearly 70 million users.)