Meanwhile, as of January 6, 2021, the app’s position in the Trump movement continues to solidify. Channels owned by far-right figures are mushrooming: Trump attorney turned election conspiracy theory Lin Wood has nearly a million subscribers; former 8chan administrator Ron Watkins has nearly half a million. Among Trump-backed politicians who have opened up thriving channels are far-right congressmen Marjorie Taylor Greene, Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert.
In August 2021, Telegram reached a total of 1 billion downloads. During Facebook’s disastrous six-hour global shutdown in October, the app welcomed 70 million new “refugees” in just one day, according to Durov.
But as Telegram gets closer to fulfilling its mission and catching up with WhatsApp, Elies Campo continues to brood. “We present ourselves as an open company, supposedly for free communication and transparency among users,” he said during one of our meetings in Ciutadella, a stately park dotted with with monuments on the edge of Barcelona’s old town. “And on the other side, we’re completely unclear about how we work.” He wonders if what he sees as Telegram’s lack of trust, even lack of trust, is holding it back.
The more he talked, the more I saw that this culture had also estranged Campo. Campo recalls, at the company’s last pre-pandemic holiday in the summer of 2019, Durov rented a large house in a small town in Finland surrounded by lakes and pine forests. As the group ate together, the conversation was in Russian. “I was the only one who spoke English with Pavel,” Campo said. “It naturally creates this point of friction.” He also feels that the team doesn’t trust him because he lives in Silicon Valley and is said to have an American mindset. Once, while Campo was trying to establish business partnerships between Telegram and US companies, Campo said that Durov wondered aloud whether he had an “economic interest” in the companies or not. no and is that why he wants to “work with them so badly”.
During that year, Campo began preparing to leave Telegram. He spent the whole fall on his last big project there, helping to roll out new features with the ultimate aim of monetizing the app. Under the new plan, large channel owners will be able to publish sponsored posts and offer paid subscriptions, from which Telegram will take a cut. (Telegram claims to never provide targeted ads based on user data.)
Before our last call in late October, Campo did something unusual. Until then, we mainly communicated on Telegram, using it for both messages and calls. But this time he wrote, “Pinged u on a different platform.” I see that he added me on Signal. Called him there, I asked why he didn’t want to talk on Telegram. “Because,” he said, “who knows?”
Is there any chance that Telegram can monitor someone’s private communications? “Technically, it’s possible,” Campo said. Doing so on a large scale would be difficult, he said, but encryption between the user and the cloud server could be disabled on a target account. “I don’t know if it happened or not.”
As I organized my report next month, I tried to speak with another senior Telegram executive: Ilya Perekopsky. In November, I wrote to him for the ninth time, but never received a substantial response. This time Perekopsky replied within 20 minutes and asked if I was in Barcelona. He said it was a coincidence that he had just landed from Dubai. Two days later, we met at an elegant beachfront restaurant south of Barcelona, near where Perekopsky’s parents lived. With her dark blonde hair and high cheekbones, Perekopsky reminds me of Russian David Bowie in a checkered shirt under a yellow puffy vest.
After grilling sea bass in the unusually hot sun, Perekopsky apologized for not replying sooner. He explained that he showed Durov my email out of concern that I was writing a “one-way” article. “I think it’s better to answer in person,” Perekopsky told his boss, who he said quickly approved the meeting. “We really don’t care too much about communicating with the outside world, because we think that will distract us,” says Perekopsky. Durov prefers to use his channel, he said, where his words cannot be twisted or “censored” by a journalist.
