Pavel Durov published a new post on his Telegram channel, in which he announced that Facebook is worried about the popularity of Telegram.
It is known that Facebook has an entire department dedicated to finding out why Telegram is so popular. Durov decided to save Facebook time and millions of dollars and revealed the success secret for free:
"Respect your users," said Pavel Durov.
Durov noted that millions of people are outraged by the latest changes to WhatsApp's privacy policy. Now users of the messenger are required to share their data with the Facebook advertising platform.
Unsurprisingly, many users have ditched WhatsApp and switched to Telegram over the past few years. The founder of Telegram suggested that Facebook corporation is unable to compete with Telegram in terms of quality and privacy. Facebook's WhatsApp seems to have switched to covert marketing: Wikipedia editors have recently exposed multiple paid bots adding biased information into the WhatsApp Wikipedia article.
Durov added that he is also aware of bots that spread misinformation about Telegram on social networks. He cited three myths that were promoted and immediately dispelled them:
Myth 1: Telegram's code is not open-source
In reality, all Telegram client apps have been open-source since 2013. Telegram encryption and API are fully documented and have been reviewed by security experts thousands of times. Moreover, Telegram is the only messaging app globally that has verifiable builds both for iOS and Android. WhatsApp intentionally obfuscates its code, making it impossible to verify their encryption and privacy.
Myth 2: Telegram is Russian
Telegram has no servers or offices in Russia and was blocked there from 2018 to 2020. Telegram is still blocked in some authoritarian countries such as Iran, while WhatsApp and other "supposedly secure" apps have never had any issue in these places.
Myth 3: Telegram is not encrypted
Every chat on Telegram has been encrypted since the launch. Telegram has Secret Chats that are end-to-end encrypted and Cloud Chats that also offer real-time secure and distributed cloud storage. On the other hand, WhatsApp had zero encryption for a few years and then adopted an encryption protocol funded by the US Government. Even if WhatsApp encryption is solid, it's invalidated via multiple backdoors and reliance on backups.
At the end of the post, Pavel Durov added:
In 2019 alone, Facebook spent almost 10 billion dollars on marketing. Unlike Facebook, Telegram doesn't spend any money, let alone billions of dollars, on marketing. We believe that people are smart enough to choose what is best for them. And, judging by the half a billion people using Telegram, this belief is justified.
