WhatsApp mass move to Telegram, even Erdogan

Controversial WhatsApp privacy updates have sparked massive user traffic to other platforms, such as Telegram and Signal, as they seem to disagree with Facebook's decision to want their data.

The Telegram service surpassed 500 million active users earlier this year, and now company founder Pavel Durov says the number of accounts activated on the platform has grown even more in recent days.

"Growth has accelerated so much that 'we may be witnessing the largest digital migration in human history,'" Durov said in a blog post this week. revealing that even political leaders have joined the platform.

The presidents of Brazil and Turkey have been using Telegram for the past few days, with the exception of the leaders of France, Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and Mexico, who have been active on the platform for some time.

Durov stressed Telegram's commitment to transparency in communication channels, explaining that there are no active monitoring algorithms on the platform.

"We are proud that political leaders, as well as many public organizations, are relying on the Telegram to combat misinformation and raise awareness of important issues in their societies. Unlike other networks, Telegram does not use opaque algorithms to decide whether or not a subscriber will see content they have subscribed to. As a result, Telegram channels are the only direct way for leaders to connect reliably with their audience.

WhatsApp has already announced a delay of 3 months for the new privacy policy, explaining that he wants to give everyone more time to understand what is changing.

However, the company states that consumers are not affected, as their data will not be shared on Facebook or third parties, because the new privacy policy only applies to businesses.

The new deadline for enforcing the new privacy policy is May 15th.