His first company was VKontakte, a Facebook-esque social network he began in 2006. As can often happen in the dim, overlapping worlds of Russian business and politics, Durov’s origin story is somewhat hazy. It’s, like, woohoo, we’re doing great-but the world’s on fire.”įrom another part of the world often engulfed in turmoil came Durov and Telegram. “It’s a little bit bittersweet, because a lot of times our spikes come from bad events. “Any time there is some form of unrest or a contentious election, there seems to be an opportunity for us to build our audience,” Acton told Time in September. When Acton announced his decision to form the Signal Foundation, he wrote out an effusive blog post, loftily describing Signal’s goal as “to act in the public interest and making a meaningful contribution to society by building sustainable technology that respects users.” In Acton’s mind, the app would be used as it was this summer, firmly in the hands of BLM protesters who found it a useful organizing tool. The two met, liked each other and worked to add some of Signal’s encryption software to WhatsApp. While at Facebook, a mutual friend reportedly introduced Marlinspike and Acton. Three years later, they sold the app to the company that had once turned them away, inking a $22 billion deal with Facebook. They later applied and were rejected from jobs at Facebook before the pair founded WhatsApp in 2009. “You don’t make anyone’s life better by making advertisements work better.”) He and fellow Yahoo employee Jan Koum left the business in 2008 and took a year off, partly for a South American vacation, partly to play a lot of ultimate Frisbee. (“Dealing with ads is depressing,” he told Forbes in 2014. (That’s a pseudonym-his real name is unknown.) Its nearly impenetrable encryption technology quickly won the plaudits of a varied group-from the likes of billionaire Jack Dorsey, who incorporated a portion of its encryption software to Twitter, to Edward Snowden, who has said he uses Signal every single day.Īcton was a former Yahoo software engineer who left in a huff over the company’s relentless focus on moneymaking. Signal first launched in 2014, created by a security researcher named Moxie Marlinspike. “We take this responsibility very seriously. “Telegram has become the largest refugee for those seeking a communication platform committed to privacy and security,” Durov wrote in a Telegram post trumpeting the user influx. Or about intentions to turn away the new users. He sees a “PR crisis” brewing for the two apps as conservative groups take hold there-and the companies say nothing publicly about the influx. “I’m really skeptical,” says Will Partin, an analyst at Data & Society, an internet research outfit who monitors right-wing hate speech online. This undoubtedly drew in some users but is, at most, only part of the story. And in Telegram’s, it’s Pavel Durov, a 36-year-old Russian.īoth Signal and Telegram attributed the recent download surge to new users fleeing WhatsApp, a chief competitor that recently made changes to its privacy settings. Along with their immense newfound popularity, Telegram and Signal share an additional commonality: They’re the well-financed products of two young, rich, idealistic tech titans. Those figures, respectively, represent a 409% and 61% increase from their average daily downloads in 2020, according to Apptopia, which monitors app downloads. 10, Signal was downloaded an average of 251,000 times a day, while Telegram did an average of 1.1 million. The two apps have topped Apple’s AAPL download charts in the past week, racking up record numbers of downloads. Signal doesn’t appear to have any such policies and doesn’t have access to users’ messages, theoretically making it impossible to cooperate with a police investigation. These right-wing users are drawn to it for the same reasons BLM organizers liked it: It offers the ability to plan and communicate en masse without worrying about the app exerting content-moderation policies or aiding authorities pursuing charges against them. But in an ironic twist, the app is poised to become a new digital haven for conservatives-just as Facebook before it. It is especially valued among journalists and activists like the ones who planned the Black Lives Matter protests. Grandly, he envisioned Signal making “private communication accessible and ubiquitous,” he told Forbes in 2018, and the app has largely lived up to his expectations. With the new funding, it wouldn’t need to cave to commercial interests and sell ads, something Acton hated about Facebook. Signal offered easy communication and secure, total anonymity.
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