Pavel Durov

is something that we had to deal with for some time because it's a very easy way to attack you.

At some point you don't understand where it is coming from.

Is it our competitors?

We must give credit to our competitors if it's their invention to launch these kind of rumors because at a certain point they must have realized they can't compete

technologically, on the product side, so they must do something like this.

Or it's just governments launching these rumors, trying to discredit the platform, trying to scare their citizens away from it, because they understand that their power and grip of their own country is in danger, as long as they allow a pro-freedom platform to operate.

I think people are smart.

Every time I meet somebody from one of these countries you mentioned, in real life, people recognize me in the street.

Say here in Dubai, they come over, they seem incredibly grateful and understanding.

the propaganda in each of these countries would tell them a number of things but they learned to discount it that's why they're so happy that telegram exists is because the way they can

understand the world around them is to receive conflicting mutually exclusive viewpoints from sources that hate each other and try to understand what really is true.

Because there is no such thing as an unbiased source of information.

When the war in Ukraine started in 2022,

And I didn't want Telegram to be used as a tool for war.

And I said, and I posted it publicly, I suggested maybe we should just suspend the activity of all politics-related channels in both countries for the time of the war.

Maybe we shouldn't have channels in these two countries.

They told me, both people in Ukraine and in Russia, that I don't get to babysit them and decide for them

what sources of information that they have to be granted access to.

They are grown-ups that can make these decisions for themselves.

They understand that there is a lot of propaganda.