A hoax against Whatsapp shoots the number of Telegram users in Spain

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A 3D Whatsapp logo.
A Hoax Against Whatsapp Shoots The Number Of Telegram Users

The Russian ‘app’ becomes popular on the App Store and Google Play, after Vox and PP politicians falsely accused the Facebook application of censorship

A 3D Whatsapp logo.

Telegram increases its number of users in Spain, and it does so almost overnight. Although the application has been in the country for more than six years, it took a few days for the Russian messaging app to position itself among the five most popular applications on Google Play, and to be the ninth in the App Store on Monday. And the most curious thing is that this sudden popularity is largely due to the hoaxes spread on social networks about WhatsApp, its great rival, according to experts.

Political parties such as Vox and some PP politicians have encouraged citizens to leave WhatsApp for days, after accusing it of censoring messages under alleged pressure from the Spanish government. Rafael Hernando, senator for the PP, went on to assure on Twitter that “if WhatsApp continues to maintain its stupid idea, following instructions from the Sanchezstein Government, to limit the dissemination of critical messages to the Government, it will not only collaborate with banana censorship, but the People will go to the Russian Telegram and others. ” The wick against WhatsApp was served, and seems to have worked.

In this campaign against this latest app, it has also been said that the Facebook information verifiers in Spain, Maldita and Newtral, censor the messages forwarded by WhatsApp users, something that both the Facebook application and the two organizations mentioned have denied Because the messages sent through this application are encrypted from end to end and their content cannot be known. Except the sender and receiver.

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Those who started the hoax used WhatsApp’s global announcement last week. The firm then announced that it was going to limit the forwarding of “highly forwarded messages” on its platform to try to prevent hoaxes and erroneous information from viralizing. He was referring to those messages that had already been forwarded more than five times before they reached someone else.

As WhatsApp and Facebook have clarified, “the new global forwarding limit is made globally and automatically, and was implemented to keep service personal and private, and to reduce the spread of viral messages. It is not related in any way to verification organizations or censorship, and any claims that suggest otherwise are false. ”

Telegram logo. "Srcset =" https: https: //d500.epimg.net/t.gif 200w
Telegram logo.

Maldita.es and Newtral have also indicated on their own that they are not verifying content for WhatsApp, because they do not have access to the content of their messages. The first of these organizations also indicated that if their number appears in the WhatsApp FAQs, along with dozens of other fact-checkers around the world, it is like a recommendation of where you can verify “if the data you receive (by WhatsApp) ) appear suspicious or imprecise. “

Despite all the clarifications, Telegram continues to see how many Spanish users are opening accounts on the platform in the last few hours. “Now we find a certain number of people leaving WhatsApp to search absurdly for a place where, according to them, they can speak without being censured by the government,” says IE Business School professor Enrique Dans on his blog, who confesses to taking years without using this last platform. “I prefer Telegram, and each person is free to use the messaging app they prefer, but if someone decides to stop using WhatsApp, it is not because they have swallowed an absurd hoax.”

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Beyond that the main reason for the growth of Telegram is the flight of the WhatsApp people by the aforementioned hoax, the application, launched in 2013 by the Russians Nikolai and Pavel Durov, has also been able to benefit from the channel opened by the Ministry of Health on its platform, which has grown by more than 100,000 users since March. Telegram currently has 200 million active users worldwide, according to reports on Google Play, although the data has not been updated since March 2018. WhatsApp has around 2,000 million, and in Spain it has more than 80% share market.