WhatsApp is blocking Telegram links

According to the Telegram FAQ [1] the Telegram Facebook page [2] has been taken down as well.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;telegram.org&#x2F;faq#facebook" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;telegram.org&#x2F;faq#facebook</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;tlgrm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;tlgrm</a>

This is an extraordinarily bad precedent. Facebook has traditionally bought companies that it felt were competitive threats (Instagram, Whatsapp, etc) even though a significant percentage of their growth came from shares on Facebook products. It now appears that they will deal with competitors by crushing their ability to grow.<p>Of course, they are going to say that this is because of Telegram&#x27;s links to terrorism. But any secure messenger can be used by bad actors, so that same excuse could be used for the wholesale blocking of all competing messengers. This is clearly anticompetitive behavior.

I think this is a good opportunity to plug Signal. Telegram uses a non-standard DIY crypto protocol that already had attacks, its chats are not end to end encrypted by default, and Telegram stores all your messages in the cloud by default while deceptively advertising as a &#x27;private&#x27; alternative.<p>Signal &#x2F; TextSecure on the other hand is encrypted by default, implements more thoroughly audited cryptography, and is recommended by Edward Snowden and Bruce Schneier.

I saw this pop up on &#x2F;r&#x2F;android yesterday and it made me and a couple friends sign up for Telegram, so I guess good job whatsapp on pushing more people towards Telegram. Streisand effect in action!

I use both whatsapp and telegram.. with whatsapp being the majority of my messaging, I&#x27;d been a little apprehensive since the facebook takeover, but haven&#x27;t changed my usage habits. This was exactly what it took for me to start pushing my friends to telegram.

Wow, didn&#x27;t expect this from WhatsApp. I wonder if we can hear it from their side to see if they have a specific reason. Also, are they blocking any other messenger links i.e WeChat, Line etc or just Telegram.

Playing devil&#x27;s advocate: WhatsApp is a $22B investment. It makes sense to try to prevent it from being canabalized from the inside.<p>We&#x27;ve seen something like this before, when AIM allowed MSN Messenger to interoperate. I know this is a little different, but that was still how AIM lost.<p>Here is a fantastic war story from one of the MSN engineers on the battle to subvert AIM [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nplusonemag.com&#x2F;issue-19&#x2F;essays&#x2F;chat-wars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nplusonemag.com&#x2F;issue-19&#x2F;essays&#x2F;chat-wars&#x2F;</a>

My suspicion woud be that they triggered some automated anti-spam system.<p>Intentionally blocking your competitor in this situation doesn&#x27;t seem like a good idea, it mostly generates publicity for them.

A friend once mourned that she got too many spam mails. I recommended her a throwaway e-mail service via a private Facebook message. FB blocked my message telling me that I can not send it as it includes a dangerous link.<p>I made a screenshot of this response and wanted to share that instead. The funny thing is that in the screenshot, FBs red comment re: the dangerous link was so blurry that you could not read it. I guess this was probably due to a compression algorithm they apply on pictures but it is funny that the rest of the message was easily readable in the screenshot.

This is a sign that Facebook is in trouble. More and more people are fed up with its slow UI and are moving elsewhere, and increasingly to Telegram.

Signal from Open Whisper Systems is open source, easy to use, provides rock solid encryption for both text and audio calls and is available on both iOS and Android: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whispersystems.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whispersystems.org&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m opportunistically supporting more secure messengers by &quot;digital osmosis&quot;.<p>Next to WhatsApp I also have installed:<p>1. Signal<p>2. Threema<p>3. Telegram<p>And I will use those (in described order) if possible.<p>Threema seems to be comparatively popular in Germany, while Telegram is at least not among my peers and Signal (the one recommended by Schneier and Snowden) is only used by my gf (b&#x2F;c I installed it for her).

To be the best, you need to learn from the best. Tencent&#x27;s immensely popular WeChat (Weixin) has been blocking links to Baidu properties for a while now.<p>Coming soon to a server near you!

Whatsapp (facebook) is not the only the only company keen on censoring.<p>Airbnb chat also censors messages. Typically when you try to give your number or whatsapp or some link.

Isn&#x27;t telegram just a really bad version of signal?

Is it safe to say this is a kin to AT&amp;T blocking calls from T-Mobile? I can&#x27;t see how this isn&#x27;t going elevate the profile of Telegram.

Funny thing: when I send &#x27;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;telegram.org&#x27;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;telegram.org&#x27;</a> the receiver got it as a hyperlink. But on my phone it remain in plain text.<p>(I just tried with my colleague)

Any lawyers here? Would this be considered monopolistic behavior? Or a constitutional violation?

Interesting that WhatsApp didn&#x27;t bother to update anything that much lately but they took their time to censor Telegram. Cool stuff.

Could someone with the time and resource at hand independently decompile and verify the veracity of the code?<p>It looks a bit fishy as it reads like an actual code as opposed to one outputted from a decompiler.

Another reason for using Mozilla Thunderbird for your communications needs.<p>Soon we&#x27;ll have wall charts of who can and can&#x27;t talk to what.

Seems to be working again here, but this sort of thing is enough to worry me though.<p>Same problem as I have with facebook, there is too much critical mass to switch :(

&quot;making the world more open and connected&quot;

I hadn&#x27;t taken notice of Telegram until now. I&#x27;ve just told all my friends who are very heavy Facebook chat users about it.<p>A migration has begun.

What&#x27;s more likely happening is that Telegram links are being used in a lot more spam. As a result, it&#x27;s much better for WhatsApp users as a whole to just block Telegram links. It&#x27;s brute force, but it&#x27;s better than a poor user experience.