Facebook is rooting against Telegram: why Durov calls to leave WhatsApp

Recently, Facebook-owned WhatsApp offered new terms to its users. Phone number data, transaction information, information about users' mobile devices, as well as IP addresses will now be transmitted to this social network. For those who do not sign the new agreement, the messenger will simply stop working.

Pavel Durov published a post on his Telegram channel in which he criticized Facebook and WhatsApp, claiming that the social network has a special unit that studies the messenger and the phenomenon of its popularity. He also added that now the company is actually waging an information war against Telegram.

The text of the post made by Pavel Durov:

“I heard that Facebook has a whole department dedicated to figuring out why Telegram is so popular. Imagine that dozens of employees work in this area alone full time.

I'm happy to save Facebook tens of millions of dollars and give away our secret for free: Respect your users.

Millions of people are outraged by the latest change to WhatsApp's Privacy Terms, which now states that users must submit all of their personal data to the Facebook advertising system.

Not surprisingly, the flight of users from WhatsApp to Telegram, which has been going on for several years, has accelerated.

Telegram, which has about 500 million users and is constantly growing, has become a serious problem for the Facebook corporation.

Unable to compete with Telegram in terms of quality and privacy, WhatsApp seems to have switched to hidden marketing: Wikipedia editors recently discovered several paid bots adding biased information to an article about WhatsApp.

We also found bots that spread inaccurate information about Telegram on social networks.

Here are 3 myths they are promoting:

Myth 1. "Telegram code is not open." In fact, all Telegram client applications have been open source since 2013. Our encryption and API are fully documented and reviewed thousands of times by security experts.

Myth 2. "Telegram - Russian". In fact, Telegram has no servers or offices in Russia and was blocked there from 2018 to 2020. Telegram is still blocked in some authoritarian countries like Iran, while WhatsApp and other "supposedly safe" apps have never had a problem there.

Myth 3. Telegram is not encrypted. Every Telegram chat has been encrypted since launch. We have Secret Chats, which are end-to-end encrypted, and Cloud Chats, which also offer secure and distributed real-time cloud storage.

WhatsApp, on the other hand, hasn't used encryption for several years and then adopted a US government-funded encryption protocol.

Even if we assume that WhatsApp encryption is secure, it becomes invalid due to the many backdoors and the use of backups.

In 2019 alone, Facebook spent nearly $ 10 billion on marketing (I assume this includes paid bots on Wikipedia and other sites). Unlike Facebook, Telegram doesn't spend money, let alone billions of dollars, on marketing.

We believe that people are smart enough to choose what suits them best. And judging by half a billion people using Telegram, this belief is justified".

Meanwhile, as it was already reported by Novye Izvestia, Donald Trump was blocked on Twitter. Almost immediately there were messages on the network that he could open a channel in Telegram.

Moreover, the Telegram channel signed by "45 US President" has already been discovered, but it is not possible to verify its belonging directly to Trump. More than 278.9 thousand people have already subscribed to it, reports Lenta.ru. Later, a link to a fraudulent service was published on this channel.

Meanwhile, economist Mikhail Khazin published the following message: "Trump had to open an account on Telegram. We got local social networks and messengers, he says he has no strength. US President Donald Trump, apparently, plans to open his own social network platform. He wants to soon" make a big announcement "about it. In America, it turns the press over".