I’ve only played with it for a few minutes, and skimming a few articles can hardly be called research, but it seems to me #Telegram has practically been engineered to not only provide secure messaging, but also be a perfect platform for extremists. Am I wrong?

I don't know about #Telegram's goals, but if I developed a really secure system with end-to-end encryption than it is safe for me as well as for any bad actor because in really secure systems the service provider would have no way to read (and thus filter) any messages.

My problem with Telegram is not its (somewhat mediocre) end-to-end encryption support (see heise.de/hintergrund/Telegra…), rather the way it enables one-to-many broadcast and doesn’t give a flying fuck about the kind of content it’s used for

Did you notice the vita? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_… ... (pointing to VK)

Sorry, I don't know what to make out of your comment. Perhaps we discuss different levels of abstraction. It might be that Telegram "encourages" or "ignores" illegal behaviour but if we really have a secure system than we can only "ignore" that because we don't know better.

VK and Telegram are both home of extremists and were at least founded by the same people. For both we do „know better“. It’s not something like Tor which is basically a technical (semi) decentralized protocol, they are centralized managed platforms...