Once a tech platform approaches a billion users, it stands to reason that most people have heard of it. Telegram might have been the exception… at least until its founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in Paris as part of a wider investigation into an array of crimes taking place on the platform, from the spread of child sexual abuse material to drug trafficking.
Mark as unread
Some 950 million people reportedly use Telegram every month, a figure that’s steadily climbed every year since it was launched in 2013, and one that makes it more popular than Twitter/X, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
While millions use Telegram as a simple messaging service like WhatsApp or iMessage, many flock to the platform to take advantage of Durov’s laissez-faire approach to content moderation, which has seen it become “a theater of war, a clandestine marketplace, a safe haven for the deplatformed” and, according to the same Atlantic piece, “the world’s most important app”.
The way that Durov’s been running Telegram made the Russian-born billionaire’s arrest inevitable, writes Casey Newton in a new Sherwood piece, with the defense of its content moderation as “within industry standards” seeming “obviously false”. However, the longstanding accusations against Telegram and its position on criminal activity don’t seem to have hurt it on the road to 1 billion users.
Durovs’ arrest is perhaps even more important than it would be for any other founder-led company because of its remarkably small headcount: the business reportedly employs just ~50 full-time staff, meaning that the Telegrammer:worker ratio sits at around 19 million to 1.
