Elon Musk’s Twitter won’t die, look at iteration of Telegram
Asocialnetwork,privatelyrunbyabillionaire 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 Twiter Inc. is going under Elon Musk, but it’s also the current iterationoftelegram,amessagingandbroadcasting app that’s relatively unknown in the US and more than double Twiter’s size, with about 700 million active users, and even fewer staff. As Musk steers Twiter toward becoming a lawless paradise — most recently by dropping its COVID-19 misinformation rulesandreinstatingthousandsofpreviouslybanned accounts — some have compared the plaform 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 Twiter 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 Twiter has 16 rules about content, Telegram has just three.
Musk’slatestactionssuggesthe’llwhitletwiter’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 plaform boasts just a handful of Bollywood actors andleadersincludingformerbrazilianpresidentjair Bolsonaro, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump Jr.
The reason, which will come as a surprise to no one, is that government leaders, celebrities and big brands don’t like siting alongside a thriving network of extremists. On Telegram that includes Qanon influencer Ghostezra (177,000 followers), white supremacy propagandist Jack Posobiec (187,000 followers) and anti-muslim activist and US political candidate Laura Loomer (31,400 followers).
Of course, the world of content is a gray one, and having no rules isn’t all bad. Telegram managed to avoid geting banned in Russia this year because it does nothing to misinformation, meaning it didn’t take down Kremlin propaganda about its “special military operation” in Ukraine, unlike Youtube, Facebook and Twiter. That allowed Telegram to become a rare gateway to the truth about the war for Russian citizens. Importantly for Musk, having fewer rules is also cheaper, since you don’t need thousands of content moderators and policy staff to enforce them. While Facebook has an estimated 15,000 moderators, Telegram gets by with a few hundred. Musk again is moving in that direction, having recently cut 80% of Twiter’s contractors who were mostly enforcing its content rules. In Musk speak, this is pulling Twiter back toward being more of a “tech firm,” where engineers and computer programmers are the rock stars, not policy staff. Sure, the later have helped stop Twiter from undermining democracy, but they also weigh on margins. There’s a few other ways that Telegram has preempted Musk. For example, Durov had a public beef with Apple in 2020 over its 30% subscription fee two years before Musk did, and he also launched Telegram’s $5 subscription in June, while Twiter will launch its $8 fee in due course.
Ultimately, Telegram’s continued popularity dispels any notion that Twiter will die. Celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg, Jim Carrey and Trent Reznor, who’ve cited rising toxicity under Musk, will continue to leave, but many others will stay, and reconcile themselves with siting alongside anti-vax influencers and holocaust deniers. Today’s biggest social networks are entrenched. Even Facebook, despite its financial decline, continues to atract 2 billion users daily. And Musk’s brutal cost-cuting at Twitter shows you don’t need huge armies of people to keep such services going. Whatsapp, prior to selling to Facebook in 2015, had 450 million active users and a workforce of just 55 people.