2024-08-27 17:01:29
The Telegram app has nearly 900 million users and is expected to pass 1 billion users by the end of the year. At least such are the expectations of its co-founder Pavel Durov, notes France Press. In an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson in April, Durov added that people value the independence of the Telegram platform and that it respects their privacy and freedom.
Some channels in Telegram, created in 2013, have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, such as the Russian channel “Ribar” or the Ukrainian channel “Deep State”. This partly explains Telegram’s success since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
But with Telegram, users must manually enable encryption, making it an insecure app, said Stephanie Liu, a privacy expert at consultancy Forrester.
According to Damien Bankal, a cybersecurity expert and author of the specialized blog Zataz, Telegram is also a platform used for illegal activity. There, for example, cyber pirates can resell stolen data in it.
And with its discussion groups, which can host up to 200,000 people, “Telegram” is also accused of spreading false information and hate speech, neo-Nazi, pedophile, conspiratorial and terrorist content, notes France Presse.
In an interview with the Financial Times in March, Durov said he plans to improve Telegram’s content moderation mechanisms this year, particularly through artificial intelligence. “But if the content doesn’t cross the red lines, I don’t think we should be policing how people express themselves,” he added.
Durov has said in the past that the idea for Telegram came to him after being pressured in his native Russia. He says he developed Telegram while traveling. He tried to settle in Berlin, London, Singapore, San Francisco. Finally, in 2017, he chose to settle in Dubai because, according to him, the emirate was neutral at a time when the EU and the US were putting pressure on internet platforms, writes BTA.
Over the years, Telegram has been the subject of attempts to block it in Iran and Russia in 2018, respectively, for harboring violent opposition groups and for failing to provide authorities with encryption codes, in Brazil in 2023 for failing to provide authorities with data on neo-Nazi groups and in March in Spain for violating intellectual property rights.
Telegram has about 50 full-time employees. In 2021, the app opened up to ads, but assured that it would not use users’ personal data to target advertising. This was followed by the introduction of a subscription for the premium version of the app in 2022.
Durov does not rule out the possibility of listing “Telegram” on the stock exchange.
In March, the platform also introduced a revenue sharing system with its content creators.