Digital Citizen

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Digital Platforms International

A Look into the 'Libertarian' Telegram

Via Wired

February 2022

Read the full story about the origins of Telegram

https://www.wired.com/story/how-telegram-became-anti-facebook/

(article excerpts)

For 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. But over the past year or so, Mark Zuckerberg's empire has begun to look a little less invulnerable. 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. Somehow Telegram, with its tiny staff, has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of those stumbles.

Whether this is a good thing for the world is another question, one muddied by how poorly understood Telegram is, especially in the US. The vast majority of journalists still refer to it as an “encrypted messaging app.” This description unnerves many security experts, who warn that, unlike Signal or WhatsApp, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default; that users must go out of their way to turn on the app's “secret chats” function (which few people actually do); and that only individual conversations, not those among groups, can be end-to-end encrypted. For the millions of people who use Telegram under repressive regimes, experts say, that confusion could be costly.

But the term “messaging app” is itself somewhat misleading, in ways that lead many to underestimate Telegram. Over the years, the app has become a deliberate hybrid of a messaging service and a social media platform—a rival not only to WhatsApp and Signal but also, increasingly, to Facebook itself. Users can join public or private channels with unlimited numbers of followers, where anyone can like, share, or comment. They can also join private groups with up to 200,000 members—a scale that dwarfs WhatsApp's 256-member limit. But unlike Facebook, at Telegram there is no targeted advertising and no algorithmic feed...

It's been vital to pro-democracy protesters from Belarus to Hong Kong, but the global right seems to find Telegram particularly congenial...

In interviews, (Telegram's Russian founder) Durov would depict Telegram as a distributed company, free of any one country's jurisdiction and security apparatus—and, above all, beyond the grip of Putin's Russia. He portrayed himself to the Times as an “exile,” a depiction that would go on to reappear in countless press accounts. The paper described him as a “nomad, moving from country to country every few weeks with a small band of computer programmers.” Durov's Instagram feed seemed to bear this out, with snapshots of glamorous hotels and landmarks in the places he stayed—in Beverly Hills, Paris, London, Rome, Venice, Bali, Helsinki...

In 2015 alone, Telegram's small team created a platform for users to create and publish their own chatbots; they added reply, mention, and hashtag functions to group chats; they added in-app video playback and a new photo editor; and, for the first time, they introduced public channels for those wanting to broadcast to an unlimited number of followers. Only Facebook, with its much larger staff, was adding features at a comparable rate...

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.”

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NewsGuard targets Disinformation / Misinformation: Check out the NewsGuard online services

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsGuard

https://www.newsguardtech.com/

https://www.newsguardtech.com/solutions/newsguard/

https://www.newsguardtech.com/solutions/misinformation-fingerprints/

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