Elon Musk's Twitter Won't Die. Look at Telegram.
A social network, privately run by a billionaire free-speech advocate, on a shoestring budget, hosting politicians with millions of followers, and with very loose content rules.
Sound familiar?
That's the direction Twitter Inc. is going under Elon Musk, but it's also the current iteration of Telegram, a messaging and broadcasting app that's relatively unknown in the US and more than double Twitter's size, with about 700 million active users, and even fewer staff.
As Musk steers Twitter toward becoming a lawless paradise — most recently by dropping its Covid-19 misinformation rules and reinstating thousands of previously banned accounts — some have compared the platform to 4chan, the chaotic image board teeming with porn and racist memes. But Telegram, which has evolved into a broadcasting service similar to Twitter, offers a more realistic template. Its continued growth suggests a future that Musk's critics (myself included) will find difficult to swallow: Even as Twitter drains cash, staff and celebrity users, it could still thrive with activity.
Telegram was founded as a messaging app by Pavel Durov, a Russian-born libertarian billionaire whose strong views on free speech are reflected in the app's scant rules on behavior. While Twitter has 16 rules about content, Telegram has just three.
Musk's latest actions suggest he'll whittle Twitter's policies down to Telegram's size, initially by taking a more lax approach to enforcement. But he'll pay the price in advertising dollars and famous names, just like Telegram. Despite its enormous size, Durov's platform boasts just a handful of Bollywood actors and leaders including Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Donald Trump Jr.
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