Telegram Messenger founder, Pavel Durov has made claims that are bots being used to discredit his popular messaging app on Wikipedia.
We have also detected bots which spread inaccurate information about Telegram on social media,” he said.
Pavel claims that Telegram has become a major problem for Facebook and he heard that the company has an entire department devoted to figure out why it is popular.
“At about 500 million users and growing, Telegram has become a major problem for the Facebook corporation. Unable to compete with Telegram in quality and privacy, Facebook’s WhatsApp seems to have switched to covert marketing: Wikipedia editors have recently exposed multiple paid bots adding biased information into the WhatsApp Wikipedia article,” he said.
Telegram found out that the bots were spreading myths about them that Pavel says they are not true. First myth was the fact that Telegram was not open-source. The second myth revolved about the app being “Russian” and the third myth was the app not being encrypted. Pavel explained in detail complete with citations as to why those were false.
“In 2019 alone, Facebook spent almost 10 billion dollars on marketing, I guess this includes paid bots on Wikipedia and other sites,” Pavel retorted.
The response by Pavel Durov comes at a time Facebook is receiving a lot of backlash over WhatsApp latest policy change. This week, people have received notices from WhatsApp to consent to sharing their data which has led people to migrate to Telegram or even Signal Messenger.
