[nathankleyn]

These are Telegram channels, which is a private individual broadcasting messages to others publicly (as opposed to 1-1 private messaging, which is encrypted end-to-end).

It seems perfectly reasonable that they can and will moderate channels, but not conversations.

[thecatspaw]

1 to 1 private messaging is not encrypted by default, logs are stored on a server and made available to all devices by a certain user. If you enable 1-1 encryption, it is only possible to read the conversation on those 2 devices that iniated it, as only those have the keys to decrypt it.