Hundreds of thousands are signing up for Telegram from Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

In addition to Arabic, we’ve just added support for Hebrew in the Telegram UI. Everyone affected should have reliable access to news and private communication in these dire times.

Every day, Telegram's moderators and AI tools remove millions of obviously harmful content from our public platform. However, tackling war-related coverage is seldom obvious.

Earlier this week, Hamas used Telegram to warn civilians in Ashkelon to leave the area ahead of their missile strikes. Would shutting down their channel help save lives — or would it endanger more lives?

It’s always tempting to act on emotional impulses. But such complex situations require thorough consideration that should also take into account the differences between social platforms.

Unlike other apps that algorithmically promote shocking content to unsuspecting people, on Telegram, users receive only the content to which they specifically subscribed. As such, it's unlikely that Telegram channels can be used to significantly amplify propaganda. Instead, they serve as a unique source of first-hand information for researchers, journalists, and fact-checkers.

While it would be easy for us to destroy this source of information, doing so risks exacerbating an already dire situation.

The Saved Messages feature launched by Telegram 7 years ago has since become an industry standard.

But now it’s time for the industry to move beyond the simple “sending a message to myself” concept we introduced years ago. This past week, we evolved Saved Messages into an advanced yet easy-to-use Bookmarks/Favorites/Notes service, with new options to organize and view saved content.

This comes on top of many other features we launched this past month. Speaking of which, I personally love the animation of the new one-time voice and video messages — it is pure art. Enjoy!

https://telegram.org/blog/new-saved-messages-and-9-more