(Dubai) Telegram messaging has nearly 900 million users and should cross the billion mark within a year, its boss said in an interview published Wednesday.
“Telegram is spreading like wildfire. Two and a half million users register every day,” said Russian Pavel Durov, co-founder with his brother Nikolai, in a rare video interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson.
People value the “independence, privacy and freedom” the platform offers them compared to competing apps, he added.
Online messaging, on which communications are end-to-end encrypted and whose head office is in Dubai, has positioned itself against the tide of American platforms, criticized for their commercial exploitation of personal data.
It also committed to never revealing information about its users.
Pavel Durov said he had the idea of launching encrypted messaging after having suffered a lot of pressure from Russian authorities at the time of VK, a social network he created in his country of origin before selling it and leaving Russia in 2014.
He said he then tried settling in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco before settling on Dubai, whose business environment and “neutrality” he praised.
“I think we’re doing a good job with Telegram, with 900 million users that will probably exceed 1 billion active monthly users within a year,” he said.
In the Gulf emirate, Telegram has sheltered itself from state moderation rules, at a time when the European Union like the United States is putting pressure on large platforms to delete illegal content.
With its discussion groups of up to 200,000 people, messaging is sometimes accused of increasing the viral potential of false information, and the proliferation of hateful, neo-Nazi, pedophile, conspiratorial or terrorist content.