Telegram | Mass messaging and more

The mythology surrounding Telegram founder Pavel Durov is one of exile and reinvention: Mr. Durov declined to cooperate with Russian diktats to fork over data on Ukrainian protesters in 2014, in the months following the Euromaidan demonstrations in Kyiv. Mr. Durov’s previous company, VKontakte, remains a popular social media platform with much of the same design language and content as Telegram, which was created around the same time he left Russia.

To understand Telegram’s success in the highly expensive and competitive messaging app market, it is useful to look at what the app does differently from WhatsApp, or even Signal. The service moved quickly in its early years to deploy features that have made it a favourite among activist and dissident circles. For instance, channels send push notifications at a massive scale to subscribers, allowing activists, politicians and even news organisations to quickly get instant viewership on fast-moving events like the Russia-Ukraine war.

While some of those features have found their way into WhatsApp, Telegram stayed relevant with two more things that its competitors may have had less appetite for: incredibly large filesharing limits, and a penchant for performing its stated principles — a commitment to “user privacy and human rights such as freedom of speech and assembly,” according to an automated message shared with journalists who send the platform any inquiries.

Deep imprint

The latter manifested in its decision to quickly challenge a week-long ban in India starting June 16, following the National Testing Agency’s (NTA) concerns that exam paper leak-related frauds, made possible by editing features the app provides to backdate newly uploaded documents, may cause mass confusion. Telegram lost its petition in the Delhi High Court seeking to overturn this ban.

Just like Meta and X, a billionaire founder’s personal philosophies have left a deep imprint on the app’s functioning. Mr. Durov said the firm loses “tens of millions of dollars” in India — an estimate that is consistent with its 15 crore-strong user base and the likely hundreds of terabytes of data travelling through the platform each day.

Unlike Meta and X, which are part of a diversified galaxy of firms, allowing their founders to cross-subsidise heavy messaging, Mr. Durov’s firm is purely messaging-focused. That may have naturally incentivised the firm to vigorously fight bans and restrictions wherever possible.

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But that confrontation has come with little representation. Even in a market where the firm loses millions of dollars with such a large user base, it has only a handful of employees, mostly to liaise with the Union government. It has been embroiled in copyright-related cases at a massive scale, for instance with some Hindi newspaper publishers.

It ended up making concessions, but the last-minute participation in court — when its availability was under legitimate threat — was also visible in Brazil, where it had no personnel or legal representation at hand until a judge blocked the platform entirely. Mr. Durov, a French-Emirati-Russian citizen, was himself arrested in France for allegedly lax moderation on the platform of child sex abuse and exploitation material.

A result of not having diversified business interests is that the firm gets to speak its mind. That is certainly not the case with firms like Meta and Google, which are often in a balancing act with the Union government in cases like censorship, since they have a vast array of digital revenues at risk if they are seen as too obdurate. Relenting to demands and a give-and-take approach to a relationship with the state is typical of the Big Tech giants.

Not Telegram. The firm’s official X handle quickly responded with open derision to the ban, even as advocates at Khaitan & Co. were strenuously making a legal case to quash the ban in court. “Over 300,000 people die of drowning each year. In order to protect society, it is now illegal to consume or possess water,” the account posted on June 17. “Your government is also considering banning solid food, as it presents a needless choking hazard. You are not an adult. You are a baby. Eat the baby food,” it added.