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How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook


Hundreds of millions of users. No algorithm. No ads. Courage in the face of autocracy. Sound like a dream? Careful what you wish for.

 

On January 6, 2021, as a crowd of Donald Trump supporters began gathering for a rally near the foot of the Washington Monument, Elies Campo was spending a poignant afternoon at his family's home in Tortosa, Spain. January 6—the feast of the Epiphany, or Three Kings Day—is the high point of the holiday season there, when relatives visit and children open their presents. And Campo, a 38-year-old Spanish engineer who lives in Silicon Valley, had been largely stranded away from home since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As he moved through the house, Campo was surrounded by uncles and aunts and cousins, and he got to hold a couple of their babies for the first time. His mind was about as far from the United States as it could possibly be.

 

That changed around 8 pm, when a friend in the US pinged to ask if Campo had seen the news out of Washington, DC. Then came an avalanche of similar messages about the mob that had just stormed the Capitol building. As Campo watched the scenes of violence unfold on his phone, a question started to eat at him: How was this going to affect his company?

 

 

Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder and CEO. Photograph: Sam Barker

 

Campo worked at Telegram, a messaging app and social network with a global user base of hundreds of millions. Now, as he looked around various other social media platforms, he noticed that far-right figures were posting links on those sites to their public channels on Telegram and urging their followers to join the app.

 

Mind racing, Campo excused himself, went upstairs to his room, and continued to scour social media platforms on his laptop and phone. Within six hours, both Facebook and Twitter had blocked Trump's posts, and Campo watched more and more pro-Trump figures, fearful that they would be banned too, flood onto Telegram, bringing their audiences with them. Déu meu, he muttered to himself in Catalan—My God.

 

In the world of social media, Telegram is a distinct oddity. Often rounding out lists of the world's 10 largest platforms, it has just around 30 core employees, had no source of ongoing revenue until very recently, and—in an era when tech firms face increasing pressure to quash hate speech and misinformation—exercises virtually no content moderation, except to take down illegal pornography and calls for violence. At Telegram it is an article of faith, and a marketing pitch, that the company's platform should be available to all, regardless of politics or ideology. “For us, Telegram is an idea,” Pavel Durov, Telegram's Russian founder, has said. “It is the idea that everyone on this planet has a right to be free.”

 

Campo shared that faith—but as Telegram's head of growth, business, and partnerships, he also bore the brunt of its complications. In the mid-2010s, when the media began referring to Telegram as the “app of choice” for jihadists, it was Campo who fretted most about ISIS' use of the platform. He says he often feels like an anxious parent when messaging Durov. “I'm the nag,” Campo says. What troubled him now was how the influx of insurrection-adjacent Americans would play in the media and with the business partners he had to deal with.

 

So he wrote a long message to Durov. “Good evening Pavel,” he recalls it opening. “Have you been looking at what's happening in the US? Have you seen Trump is being blocked on other social networks?” He warned that the US far right's embrace of Telegram could “potentially eclipse” a far more flattering story that was, by sheer coincidence, driving its own stampede of new users onto the platform.

 

That same week, Telegram's much larger rival, WhatsApp, had updated its privacy policy and terms of service. Confusing wording gave many users the false impression that they'd have to begin sharing more of their information with Facebook, WhatsApp's increasingly distrusted parent company. The new policy did not, in fact, require users to share any more data than they had already fed the giant for years (their phone number, their profile names, certain metadata). But many of WhatsApp's 2 billion account holders were spooked anyway, and millions bolted from the app—many of them straight into the arms of Telegram.

 

Durov, Campo says, threw cold water on his concerns about the rush of Trump supporters. “Compared to the growth we're having from the WhatsApp terms-of-service change, this is insignificant, and just in the US narrative,” Campo recalls Durov replying. If necessary, the CEO added, he might post something on his own public channel on Telegram. Fears unassuaged, Campo stayed up until the early hours staring at his screens.

 

Sure enough, in the following days, Campo started getting questions from journalists about the mass adoption of Telegram by America's far right. He forwarded these to Durov, recommending that he speak to the media. On January 8, Durov did take to his public channel—but only to hail Telegram's huge global growth and to trash-talk Facebook, which he claimed had a whole team dedicated to figuring out “why Telegram is so popular.” On January 12, Durov posted again to celebrate the arrival of 25 million new users over the previous 72 hours. Telegram, he said, now had a population of more than half a billion. “We've had surges of downloads before,” Durov wrote. “But this time is different.” Two days later he proclaimed, “We may be witnessing the largest digital migration in human history.”

 

Yet while Durov trumpeted global statistics—38 percent of these new users were coming from Asia, he reported, while 27 percent came from Europe, 21 percent from Latin America, and 8 percent from the Middle East—he made no mention of any growth in North America. Not until January 18 did Durov post that his team had been “watching the situation closely” in the US and that Telegram's moderators had blocked hundreds of public calls for violence. But he downplayed the problem, saying that fewer than 2 percent of Telegram's users were in the US.

 

For Campo, these posts made for awkward reading. Durov had largely ignored his advice, and had declined to run any public statements by him. What's more, despite being Telegram's head of growth—typically a major role at social media firms—Campo was learning all of these statistics from Durov's public channel, like any other subscriber.

 

This was another highly abnormal thing about Telegram: Campo never got to look at raw user data. “I can't see any internal dashboard with all the numbers,” he told me last May. This contrasted starkly with the standard operating procedure at Campo's previous place of work: WhatsApp.

 

Back in 2014, after Facebook acquired WhatsApp, Campo had quit in protest against the social media giant's “addictive” algorithms and their “impact on humanity.” Yet at WhatsApp, Campo says, every single employee had access to data on user numbers in different markets. At Telegram, if Campo wanted stats, he had to explain why to his boss. Durov is “very, very, very restrictive,” Campo explains. “Everything has to go through him.”

 

 So if the CEO said that far-right activity in the US was just a blip—well, Campo had to take his word for it. And at Telegram, that was far from the only thing that rested on the word of Pavel Durov.

 

 



 Read More Here:  Wired

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