I never used Telegram, but was under the impression that it's similar to Signal. However, Pavel Durov recently tried to meddle in the Romanian elections process[0] in a very bizarre, almost desperate attempt to misinform the electorate.
That impression is a testament to Pavel's ability to distort the reality. Telegram is nothing like Signal, because the overwhelming majority of traffic is not E2EE, the server has the plaintext. Even for E2EE chats (that are deliberately hidden away), the protocol is weird in a bad way.
dgroshev|8 months ago