Telegram Gains On Whatsapp Blunder, ‘Disgust’ With Legacy Social Media

Telegram Gains On Whatsapp Blunder, ‘Disgust’ With Legacy Social Media

The Telegram logo of a paper airplane, shooting messages across the sky. The app, created by Russian ... [+] born Pavel Durov, is gaining on a general disgust with legacy social media platforms in the U.S. (Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)



SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Trump's final days in the White House ended up being a boon for Telegram.

The messaging app creating by Pavel Durov and banned in Russia by its intel service for not giving them encryption keys for a police investigation, has never had it so good.

Durov became a superstar for going against the Russian FSB. Then he became the darling of the crypto communities. And now, following all the censorship that ran amok in Trump's last days in Washington, has amassed nearly 100 million new users.

People spent the last days of 2020 and the early days of 2021 fleeing the legacy social media platforms due to Big Tech censorship, regardless of what side of the political aisle they were on. From Europe to Brazil, they fled to Signal and Telegram in droves.



Signal recorded around 17.8 million app downloads on