Those link-blocks are a typical tool at Facebook, which claims WhatsApp, in spite of the fact that they’ve been dubious before.
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Whatsapp is reportedly stopping users of its Android app from linking to rival messenger Telegram, with any URL with the word “telegram” included no longer being recognised as a hyperlink.
Links to Telegram still appear, but do not work as hyperlinks – leaving users to copy and paste the text from the message into their web browser of choice.
The team behind popular instant messenger WhatsApp recently launched a new update on Android platform that brings lots of new features and improvements. It’s not yet clear if it’s a matter of practicality, caution, or just plain rivalry on WhatsApp’s part as of yet.
“Most of the time, you can’t really compare them and it comes down to what people around you use”, user Drundolf also wrote. Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on-stage that he was “not… a big fan of WhatsApp about three years ago, and I’m not sure I am now”. While that won’t be draining anyone’s bank account, it’s still more than Telegram, which is entirely free. It appears WhatsApp has blacklisted Telegram but it’s unclear for what reason.
And yet, WhatsApp is still in the lead for now, with a whopping 900 million monthly active users, in comparison to Telegram’s 65 million monthly active users. However, this is not shocking news, since WhatsApp is owned by Facebook and the social network in the past, was caught blocking URLs from torrent website Pirate Bay and other social networks as well. That’s why it’s questionable that they would block their users from clicking a link that would send them to their rivals.
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The report ends with a Telegram spokesperson commenting, “Typically after a media backlash, FB steps back and blames their intelligent filtering for the problem,”.
