Telegram close to a billion users – founder
Encrypted messaging platform Telegram has reached 950 million monthly active users and continues to grow rapidly, its founder Pavel Durov has said.
The platform has gained 50 million users since the spring and is on track to reach one billion, the Russian-born IT entrepreneur wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday.
In April, Durov reported that the platform had 900 million active monthly users, adding that 450 million log in daily. He cited data from analytical company DataAI showing that his messenger was the sixth most used and downloaded app in the world.
Telegram has long been the most popular messaging application in Russia and Ukraine. It has also gained popularity in the rest of the world in recent years, after the Ukraine conflict escalated and even more so after Meta changed the privacy settings of WhatsApp.
Like WhatsApp or Messenger, Telegram allows users to send private and group messages. Unlike its American competitors, it also allows users to set up ‘channels’ to disseminate news and updates to followers.
The Russian-made social media platform was ranked as the most popular messaging app in Ukraine in 2023, according to SimilarWeb. Kiev, however, has long been calling for a ban on Telegram, describing it as a threat to national security.
The head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR), Kirill Budanov, who has been placed on Russia’s terrorist and extremist list, has repeatedly criticized the platform for allowing anonymous channels to publish information about the conflict in contravention of Kiev’s censorship rules. He said in April that Telegram’s popularity posed a “huge problem” for Kiev’s efforts to limit the flow of damaging information from the battlefield.
Officials in the European Union have also been seeking to regulate Telegram and are reportedly considering a move to list the app as a “very large online platform.” This would open the privacy-focused messaging app up to stringent EU censorship rules.
