Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, shared a bold statement emphasizing Telegram’s commitment to freedom of speech. While Durov didn’t explicitly name anyone, his remarks appear to reference recent announcements by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about reducing censorship on Meta platforms.
Zuckerberg had attributed this policy shift to recent political changes, including Trump's election win, calling it a "tipping point" for free speech.
In his statement, Durov highlighted Telegram’s long-standing support for freedom of speech, independent of political climates, and criticized rival platforms, saying, "The real test of their values will come when political winds change again. It’s easy to support something when you risk nothing."
Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, shared a bold statement emphasizing Telegram’s commitment to freedom of speech. While Durov didn’t explicitly name anyone, his remarks appear to reference recent announcements by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about reducing censorship on Meta platforms.
Zuckerberg had attributed this policy shift to recent political changes, including Trump's election win, calling it a "tipping point" for free speech.
In his statement, Durov highlighted Telegram’s long-standing support for freedom of speech, independent of political climates, and criticized rival platforms, saying, "The real test of their values will come when political winds change again. It’s easy to support something when you risk nothing."
That hurt tech stocks. For the past few weeks, the 10-year yield has traded between 1.72% and 2%, as traders moved into the bond for safety when Russia headlines were ugly—and out of it when headlines improved. Now, the yield is touching its pandemic-era high. If the yield breaks above that level, that could signal that it’s on a sustainable path higher. Higher long-dated bond yields make future profits less valuable—and many tech companies are valued on the basis of profits forecast for many years in the future. Given the pro-privacy stance of the platform, it’s taken as a given that it’ll be used for a number of reasons, not all of them good. And Telegram has been attached to a fair few scandals related to terrorism, sexual exploitation and crime. Back in 2015, Vox described Telegram as “ISIS’ app of choice,” saying that the platform’s real use is the ability to use channels to distribute material to large groups at once. Telegram has acted to remove public channels affiliated with terrorism, but Pavel Durov reiterated that he had no business snooping on private conversations. The War on Fakes channel has repeatedly attempted to push conspiracies that footage from Ukraine is somehow being falsified. One post on the channel from February 24 claimed without evidence that a widely viewed photo of a Ukrainian woman injured in an airstrike in the city of Chuhuiv was doctored and that the woman was seen in a different photo days later without injuries. The post, which has over 600,000 views, also baselessly claimed that the woman's blood was actually makeup or grape juice. At the start of 2018, the company attempted to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which would enable it to enable payments (and earn the cash that comes from doing so). The initial signals were promising, especially given Telegram’s user base is already fairly crypto-savvy. It raised an initial tranche of cash – worth more than a billion dollars – to help develop the coin before opening sales to the public. Unfortunately, third-party sales of coins bought in those initial fundraising rounds raised the ire of the SEC, which brought the hammer down on the whole operation. In 2020, officials ordered Telegram to pay a fine of $18.5 million and hand back much of the cash that it had raised. After fleeing Russia, the brothers founded Telegram as a way to communicate outside the Kremlin's orbit. They now run it from Dubai, and Pavel Durov says it has more than 500 million monthly active users.
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