Whenever I glance at darknet forums, people there always use Telegram for instant messaging. This seems like a strange choice for their use case, considering that Telegram is neither secure nor private[1], being centralized with Russia-controlled servers[2], phone number registration, no encryption for personal chats by default in mobile client and no encryption at all in desktop client[3], etc.
So why do they use Telegram instead of actually secure and private alternatives, like Delta Chat, XMPP+OMEMO, etc.?
Using a VPN or tor will make it basically impossible for anyone (government, law enforcement) to figure out who is posting. Unless that person uses that same login in an unsecured way. Like a regular browser. Or uses an email that was created or accessed on a regular browser.
You have to give them your phone number to sign up.
That phone number is tied to a real person by government records. Sure if you’re in say Russia it makes it a lot harder for the FBI to identify you because Russian phone companies won’t necessarily respect a US legal request. But if you’re anywhere within the west (US, Canada, EU, Australia, NZ) they can ID you unless you go to the trouble of getting an anonymous phone number that works with the SMS verification services they use and maintaining that number for when they lock your account and demand to verify you again all while accessing it over a VPN. That plus no encryption by default makes it not very secure at all.
But fundamentally you could do the same thing securely with any service, you could do that with Facebook, with Twitter, and the list goes on if you can get good reliable anonymous phone numbers. Telegram isn’t special in that way.
So you can use online phone services. Like there are websites. You pick one of the available numbers. Use it to sign up. The confirmation texts and numbers are displayed on the website. And so you use those to confirm.
These are free to use. Quite a lot of websites for this.
Is that the anonymous method you are talking about.
And sure I guess you could use it for other social media.
I’m sure some do.
But there is more censorship on FB and the like.