The WhatsApp messaging application is the most used in the world, with 2,000 million monthly active users, and it is also among the most popular in Spain, where in recent days its rival, the Russian Telegram, has gained more attention.
Part of this prominence is due to the dissemination of hoaxes on social networks on WhatsApp ensure that the verifiers of the application in Spain, Maldita and Newtral, censor the messages forwarded by users.
Since the application has end-to-end message encryption, only the sender and receiver can know them, and neither these independent organizations nor WhatsApp itself can access private conversations, as explained by Facebook, its owner.
Coinciding with this, Telegram is experiencing a boom in Spain in recent days and is in the top five positions among the most popular applications on the Google Play platform for Android devices.
This increase in attention also occurs in the App Store, the platform of Apple devices, where it is currently number one in the category of social networks in Spain.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TELEGRAM AND WHATSAPP
Telegram is far from new. This messaging service, launched in 2013 by Russians Nikolai and Pavel Durov, currently has 200 million active users worldwide, as reported on Google Play, a figure that has not been updated since March 2018.
Recently, WhatsApp added a limit to the forwarding of frequently forwarded messages, which can only be shared once per chat. This, unlike what a recent hoax claimed, “is not related in any way to verification organizations or ‘censorship'”, as Facebook has settled.
Telegram has a series of differences with respect to WhatsApp, among which is precisely the absence of limits to forward viral messages.
Among the other outstanding functions of Telegram include the possibility of creating unlimited channels of users and groups of up to 200,000 members (WhatsApp allows up to 256), send messages that self-destruct after a certain time (this function is only in betas of WhatsApp) or the optional protection against screenshots, as well as a greater number of ‘bots’.
Telegram shares many other features also available on WhatsApp and offers end-to-end encryption of messages, as well as protection of chats by biometric identification (such as fingerprint).
