Along with their immense newfound popularity, Telegram and Signal share an additional commonality: They’re the well-financed products of two young, rich, idealistic tech titans. Those figures, respectively, represent a 409% and 61% increase from their average daily downloads in 2020, according to Apptopia, which monitors app downloads. 10, Signal was downloaded an average of 251,000 times a day, while Telegram did an average of 1.1 million. The two apps have topped Apple’s AAPL download charts in the past week, racking up record numbers of downloads. Signal doesn’t appear to have any such policies and doesn’t have access to users’ messages, theoretically making it impossible to cooperate with a police investigation. These right-wing users are drawn to it for the same reasons BLM organizers liked it: It offers the ability to plan and communicate en masse without worrying about the app exerting content-moderation policies or aiding authorities pursuing charges against them. But in an ironic twist, the app is poised to become a new digital haven for conservatives-just as Facebook before it. It is especially valued among journalists and activists like the ones who planned the Black Lives Matter protests. Grandly, he envisioned Signal making “private communication accessible and ubiquitous,” he told Forbes in 2018, and the app has largely lived up to his expectations. With the new funding, it wouldn’t need to cave to commercial interests and sell ads, something Acton hated about Facebook. Signal offered easy communication and secure, total anonymity.

Signal alternative