Facebook’s controversial WhatsApp December 2020 privacy policy change, which has been met with backlash from many of its users, has resulted in the biggest digital migration in history.<\/p>\n
This is according to the founder of competing messaging service Telegram, which has recently seen a massive increase in users due to the development.<\/p>\n
Telegram’s Pavel Durov claimed<\/strong><\/a> the app’s surge in users had accelerated even further following it passing 500 million users in the first week of January 2021.<\/p>\n With that milestone, Telegram reached a quarter of the number of users that WhatsApp had in 2020\u00a0 – when it stood at 2 billion.<\/p>\n “We may be witnessing the largest digital migration in human history,” Durov stated.<\/p>\n In a previous blog post, he said that Telegram had observed a significant increase in users compared to 2020, when it had around 1.5 million new daily sign-ups.<\/p>\n The company had noted 25 million new users joined Telegram within a span of 72 hours in early January.<\/p>\n “We’ve had surges of downloads before, throughout our 7-year history of protecting user privacy. But this time is different,” Durov said.<\/p>\n WhatsApp was forced to delay<\/strong> <\/a>the implementation of the changes in its terms of service following confusion over an included\u00a0clause that allows parent company Facebook to share data from WhatsApp across its other products – including Instagram and Oculus.<\/p>\n Durov also listed multiple leaders of countries who had signed up to Telegram, the most recent of which include the presidents of Brazil and Turkey.<\/p>\n They join several other state leaders which are now on the platform, including the President Emmanuel Macron of France and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.<\/p>\n “We are honoured that political leaders, as well as numerous public organisations, rely on Telegram to combat misinformation and spread awareness about important issues in their societies,” Durov said.<\/p>\n He added that Telegram does not use nontransparent algorithms to decide whether a subscriber will see content they subscribed to or not, “unlike other networks”.<\/p>\n “As a result, Telegram channels are the only direct way for opinion leaders to reliably connect with their audiences,” Durov said.<\/p>\n “By removing the manipulative algorithms that have become synonymous with 2010s technology platforms, Telegram channels restore transparency and integrity to public ‘one-to-many’ communication,” he stated.<\/p>\n Facebook’s controversial WhatsApp December 2020 privacy policy change, which has been met with backlash from many of its users, has resulted in the biggest digital migration in history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":382414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[54803,49609,23753,2594],"class_list":["post-383578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","tag-messaging-apps","tag-pavel-durov","tag-telegram","tag-whatsapp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383578"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":383588,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383578\/revisions\/383588"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/382414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}World leaders turn to Telegram<\/h3>\n
Now read: WhatsApp still protects and secures messages, but privacy concerns remain<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"