Telegram gave authorities the data on 22,777 of its users in the first three months of 2025, according to a GitHub that reposts Telegram’s transparency reports.That number is a massive jump from the same period in 2024, which saw Telegram turn over data on only 5,826 of its users to authorities. From January 1 to March 31, Telegram sent over the data of 1,664 users in the U.S.
Telegram is a popular social network and messaging app that’s also a hub of criminal activity. Some people use the site to stay connected with friends and relatives and some people use it to spread deepfake scams, promote gambling, and sell guns.
CEO Pavel Durov long promoted the social network as a safe space for free speech and resisted cooperation with national governments. That changed last year when authorities in France arrested him after Telegram refused to turn over data related to a child abuse investigation.
Now Durov and Telegram are more cooperative with government requests for user data. As part of that process, Telegram runs a bot that will tell users how many requests the service has received and how many users have been affected. The bot only reports on data where the user is registered, but there are multiple sites and Telegram channels that share the transparency reports for a given country as they refresh. The technologist Tek, who works at Human Rights Watch, organized the data on a GitHub.
According to the GitHub data, Telegram processed at least 13,615 requests and turned over the data of 22,277 users in the first quarter of 2025. The report said that 576 of those were U.S. requests and 1,664 users were affected.
Durov had been stuck in France since his arrest, but his lawyers recently negotiated a temporary release from the country. He flew to Dubai on March 15 and started taking small shots at the French government in social media posts.
A centrist presidential candidate won an election in Romania over the weekend after fears that a hard-right populist may take power. In a post on Telegram the morning after the election, Durov implied that France had asked him to suppress the far-right candidate on Telegram.
“A Western European government (guess which 🥖) approached Telegram, asking us to silence conservative voices in Romania ahead of today’s presidential elections. I flatly refused. Telegram will not restrict the freedoms of Romanian users or block their political channels,” Durov said. “You can’t ‘defend democracy’ by destroying democracy. You can’t ‘fight election interference’ by interfering with elections. You either have freedom of speech and fair elections — or you don’t. And the Romanian people deserve both.”
Durov named the country, and the official who made the ask, in a post on X. “This spring at the Salon des Batailles in the Hôtel de Crillon, Nicolas Lerner, head of French intelligence, asked me to ban conservative voices in Romania ahead of elections. I refused. We didn’t block protesters in Russia, Belarus, or Iran. We won’t start doing it in Europe,” Durov said. The French intelligence service has denied any of this took place.
In the first three months of 2024, Telegram took 4 requests from France and turned over the data of 17 people, according to the data in the GitHubIt fielded none from Romania. In the same time period a year later it fielded 668 requests from France and turned over the data of 1,425 users. Romania got on the board too, with 37 requests of its own that affected 88 users.
