Somehow Telegram, with its tiny staff, has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of those stumbles. Lawmakers have increasingly arrayed against it, and at brief moments-like the January 2021 mass exodus from WhatsApp, and a second one that followed a Facebook outage in October-the powerful network effects that drive Meta's supremacy have seemed to shift briefly into reverse. But over the past year or so, Mark Zuckerberg's empire has begun to look a little less invulnerable. “But this time is different.” Two days later he proclaimed, “We may be witnessing the largest digital migration in human history.”įor years now, the world has fretted over Facebook's-now Meta's-seemingly inexorable dominance: its relentless neutralization of competitors either by acquisition or elimination its subjugation of politics, culture, and every facet of intimate life to the priorities of an algorithm built for ad sales its succession of escalating privacy scandals and its record of disingenuous apologies when it gets caught.
“We've had surges of downloads before,” Durov wrote. Telegram, he said, now had a population of more than half a billion. 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.
He forwarded these to Durov, recommending that he speak to the media. Sure enough, in the following days, Campo started getting questions from journalists about the mass adoption of Telegram by America's far right. Fears unassuaged, Campo stayed up until the early hours staring at his screens. If necessary, the CEO added, he might post something on his own public channel on Telegram. “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. Durov, Campo says, threw cold water on his concerns about the rush of Trump supporters.
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