Over the last five years, the amount of people worldwide who use the free messaging application WhatsApp has consistently grown, with a gradual increase seemingly becoming sharper after social media giants Facebook purchased the app in February 2014. With over 1.3 billion users worldwide as of January 2018, it shares the title of third most popular social media platform globally with Facebook Messenger. However, there are still some countries around the world who, on the whole, are yet to hop onto the bandwagon for various reasons.
Across Africa, Whatsapp reigns supreme in the social media world, with a userbase of 172 million according to a report conducted and released in January 2018 by We Are Social and Hootsuite. However, Ethiopia is an exception to this trend on the continent. Their messaging service of choice? Telegram.
The Telegram logo. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Meanwhile in Denmark, WhatsApp fails to even make the country’s top six most popular social media platforms, as referenced by data compiled by Statscounter, registering a userbase below Reddit’s 4.61 per cent of the Danish population from February 2017 to February 2018. As Facebook is listed as the most popular social media platform for Danes with the endorsement of 50.56 per cent of the population, it can be inferred that Whatsapp’s Facebook-owned sister platform Messenger, which is also free to use, is preferred as a messaging service.
Ethiopia, situated in the Horn of Africa, is an outlier not only within Africa, but globally, with only Iran and Uzbekistan for company on the list of nations whose respective populations mostly prefer Telegram as their go-to messaging service to larger players such as Facebook-owned Whatsapp and Messenger; according to Quartz, with 200 million users, Telegram’s global userbase constitutes a fifth of that of Whatsapp. With the app’s design often being compared to rival Whatsapp, its global reputation’s downfall may simply come down to when each app was established; Telegram was founded in August 2013, over four years after Whatsapp’s inception and at a time where Whatsapp was gaining 400 million users a month, according to a post published on the social media platform’s blog. It’s fair to say that Telegram were set to play catch-up from the very beginning.
So why have the people of Ethiopia opted, on the whole, for the newer application as their port of call for communicating with friends, family and colleagues?
Quartz offered a few possibilities as to how this is the case:
A screenshot of the Telegram app in action, complete with a list of active chat rooms reminiscent of rivals Whatsapp. Image: courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The political activism aspects of the app’s appeal could also explain its popularity in Iran, given the events that occurred over social media in response to dictatorships throughout the Middle East in what was widely known as the ‘Arab Spring’.
For Denmark, on the other hand, no such secretive political activism is necessary, nor does it seem to be desired by Danish people; according to a 2015 study by Statista that took into account age groups, between 35.1 percent (30 to 39 year olds) and 67.7 percent (70+ year olds) said they rarely discuss politics over Facebook. Although the statistic that represents the opinions of those 70 years old and over may come down to that age group rarely using Facebook at all, the 16-19-year-old age group that gave a 57.1 percent, the third largest percentage across the age groups, arguably would not. As for those who engaged in political discussion over Facebook ‘frequently’, the highest percentage of any age group was just 22.6 percent.
It could be seen as ironic that Denmark was chosen by Mark Zuckerberg and company to be the base for the test of a new WhatsApp plug-in for Facebook back in September 2016, as reported by The Next Web. The report states that the test is one of many “other limited rollouts” that Facebook have organised, including the trial run of a video chat application, Bonfire, an app currently exclusively available to Denmark due to geo-restrictions.
When analysing the Danes’ nearly non-existent relationship with WhatsApp, an important factor to consider when comparing Facebook CEO Zuckerberg’s messaging brainchildren is that Facebook Messenger is, as the application’s full name may suggest, built into Facebook itself, meaning that it is a separate app. WhatsApp on the other hand, though it was being planned as previously mentioned, is not yet a widely available plug-in on Facebook’s main interface, instead operating as a separate platform that needs to be installed separately. This could be a factor that may put potential users off WhatsApp altogether.
The exchange of money over mobile applications in Africa is nothing new. In the continent’s Sub-Saharan region for example, 12 per cent of adult residents were found to have been invested in some form of mobile trading platform based on a cryptocurrency of some kind, making the region the world’s global leaders in mobile accounting, according to The World Bank’s Data Topics section. Furthermore, a report by Australian comparison site Finder also references services M-Pesa and Luno to back up the report’s headline ‘Cryptocurrency is Booming in Africa’.
Although this may prove an advantage for the Russian-born platform, when it comes to its reputation as a high-security application, not everything about Telegram is as what Pavel Durov and company would have you believe, according to Gizmodo.
One such problem brought up on this particular article is that the app’s aforementioned message encryption feature is not automatic.
A Principal Technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, Christopher Soghoian, informed the technology-focused publication: “There are many Telegram users who think they are communicating in an encrypted way, when they’re not because they don’t realize that they have to turn on an additional setting.”
This is not the case for rivals WhatsApp, as the more popular messaging service encrypts messages automatically as well as phone calls. Gizmodo referred to this as the “most highly praised encryption protocol on the market”.
Another expert who aided Gizmodo’s article, University of Surrey professor Alan Woodward, drew attention to an apparent lack of evidence for the application’s homegrown MTproto protocol used to encrypt messages being safe from detection.
“[The MTproto protocol] is effectively homegrown and I’ve seen no proper proof of its security,” Woodward claimed.
Another possible reason for WhatsApp being virtually non-existent in Denmark comes down to common Danish mobile contracts, which usually include unlimited SMS messages included in the subscription price, making WhatsApp’s selling points redundant.
Given that WhatsApp can’t seem to effectively compete with Facebook Messenger in Denmark, Telegram wouldn’t have had a realistic chance, either.
Not to be deterred by their lack of popularity in much of the Facebook-dominated world, Ethiopia’s social media darling is aiming for a boost in business with CEO Pavel Durov and his team managing to raise around $850 million from 81 investors for an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), according to American technology publication The Verge.
Following this, the company are in the process of orchestrating a second round of funding with a more ambitious target of $1.7 billion. This will make Telegram’s ICO the biggest since the first token sale was concluded in July 2013.
If Telegram’s plan for a stall in the cryptocurrency market does fall into place, users will be able to exchange goods and services through the use of cryptocurrencies. It is still early days, with the ICO being expected to be released to the public in March this year, and therefore it is unclear as to how useful this development could be for users in Ethiopia.
However, Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland isn’t convinced by the 132-page plan of action. He told The Verge that the plan “reads like someone went out on the internet and harvested the most ambitious ideas from a dozen projects and said ‘let’s do all of those but better!”
Cryptocurrency Africa is an organisation that aims to stabilise the widespread use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin throughout Africa, and expresses belief through their website that “investing in cryptocurrency would accelerate the continent’s Economic Emancipation.”
“It’s usual for cryptographers to reveal the algorithms completely, but here we are in the dark. Unless you have considerable experience, you shouldn’t write your own crypto. No one really understands why they did that.”
Although they may not worry users of the app living in the predominantly democratic Western World, these comments from experts of the field of cryptography would be bound to come as a shock to Ethiopian users who see CEO Pavel Durov’s project as a safe haven from government intervention.
Clearly, the differences in motives involved in Ethiopia and Denmark rejecting WhatsApp as a common messaging platform displays a difference in circumstances for the two countries’ respective citizens. While Denmark’s reasons for the rejection essentially boils down to mere practical convenience, the people of Ethiopia’s social media choices come out of desperation to avoid unwelcome intervention from their government in response to messages that would be seen as less than favourable in the eyes of Ethiopian president Mulatu Teshome, despite aforementioned flaws in Telegram’s encryption system.
Furthermore, with social media being blocked by the Ethiopian government as recently as December 2017, it seems unlikely that the social media knowledge deficit present within Ethiopia and other underdeveloped African countries will be lowered. As for the people of Denmark, it seems that while Facebook Messenger remains more accessible and convenient than WhatsApp in their eyes, Messenger will remain number one for messaging.