01/15/2021 BY STILLNESS IN THE STORM

(Ethan Huff) Word is circulating that Apple is planning to remotely axe the Telegram app from users’ iPhones now that President Donald Trump and millions of free speech advocates have migrated there.

by Ethan Huff, January 14th, 2021

The social media platform notified its users on Tuesday that the app surpassed 500 million monthly active users during the first week of January, with 25 million new users joining just in the previous 72 hours alone.

Founder Pavel Durov said there was a massive increase in new users compared to the same time last year when roughly 1.5 million new users were signing up daily.

“We’ve had surges of downloads before, throughout our seven-year history of protecting user privacy but this time it is different,” Durov is quoted as saying on his official “Durov’s channel.”

Most of the platform’s new users appear to be out of Asia at 38 percent, along with 27 percent from Europe and 21 percent from Latin America. Eight percent come from the Middle East and North Africa.

“[People] no longer want to be held hostage by tech monopolies that seem to think they can get away with anything as long as their apps have a critical mass of users,” Durov added. “We take this responsibility very seriously, and our users have been and will always be our only priority.”

SNIP