Your first link:
42 million user IDs and phone numbers for a third-party version of Telegram were exposed online without a password. The accounts belong to users in Iran, where the official Telegram app is blocked.
How is that a state exploit of Telegram? It’s not even about Telegram. It’s a third party app.
If you - rather than the instance as a whole, and for other reasons - are the target of defederation circumventing that would be sockpuppeting.
If your instance was defederated for reasons unrelated to your behavior and content, then no - you’re simply creating an account on their instance.