How Telegram's Growth Is Rewriting Social News Playbooks

By March 2025, Telegram hit 1 billion monthly active users. That’s not just growth-it’s a seismic shift in how the world gets its news. No longer is news filtered through corporate feeds, algorithmic bias, or editorial gatekeepers. On Telegram, journalists, citizen reporters, and even governments broadcast directly to millions. And people are listening-21 times a day, on average.

The Rise of the Unfiltered Channel

Telegram didn’t start as a news platform. Launched in 2013 as a secure messaging app, it was built for privacy, not publicity. But its architecture accidentally created the perfect tool for news. Public channels let anyone broadcast to unlimited subscribers. No likes. No comments. No algorithm deciding what you see. Just a straight line from publisher to reader.

This changed everything. In 2023, Statista found 80% of Telegram users learned most of their news from the app. By 2025, users were generating over 1 trillion channel views per month. Compare that to Twitter, where posts vanish in seconds under a flood of content. On Telegram, a breaking story can stay visible for hours, even days, because it’s not buried-it’s delivered.

When WhatsApp updated its privacy policy in January 2021, 25 million people switched to Telegram in just three days. That wasn’t a fluke. It was a signal. People were tired of being tracked, manipulated, or censored. Telegram offered something different: control.

How It Works: No Algorithms, Just Direct Feeds

Unlike Facebook or Instagram, Telegram doesn’t rank posts by engagement. It doesn’t push viral lies to keep you scrolling. News arrives in chronological order. If you follow a channel, you get everything it posts-no exceptions.

This is why newsrooms like BBC, Reuters, and The New York Times now run official Telegram channels. They don’t need to chase clicks. They just need to publish. The New York Times grew its Telegram channel to 1.2 million subscribers in six months by simply cross-promoting it in their print editions and email newsletters. No paid ads. No influencer deals. Just trust.

Telegram also supports files up to 2GB. That means investigative reporters can share full PDFs, leaked documents, or raw video footage without compression. In countries like India and Russia, where internet shutdowns happen during protests, Telegram channels become lifelines. In Kashmir, during a 2023 blackout, one Reddit user wrote: “Telegram was the only way we knew what was happening outside our neighborhood.”

Who’s Using It-and Why

Telegram’s user base isn’t just young urbanites. It’s growing fastest in places traditional media ignores. The East Midlands of England saw 262% growth since 2020. Iowa, 226%. Normandy, 177%. These are rural, underserved areas where local news has vanished. Telegram filled the gap.

Demographics show it’s also popular among knowledge workers. Writers grew 119% on Telegram since 2020. Bankers, 97%. Why? Because they need timely, unfiltered information. They don’t want curated headlines-they want raw data, market updates, policy changes.

Ethnic minority communities are adopting it too. Black British users grew 250% since 2020. Asian-Americans, 200%. For these groups, mainstream media often misses their stories. Telegram channels run by community leaders now provide news in local languages, covering issues ignored by national outlets.

Even in authoritarian states, Telegram is essential. In Russia, 50% of the population has it installed. In Iran and Uzbekistan, it’s the primary source for independent news. When state media lies, Telegram tells the truth.

The Dark Side: Misinformation Without Limits

But Telegram’s openness has a cost. There’s no content moderation. No fact-checking. No warnings before you share a false story.

The Stanford Internet Observatory found coordinated disinformation campaigns on Telegram during the 2024 U.S. election. Fake videos of polling stations being burned. Doctored audio of politicians making false statements. All spread unchecked. One Reddit user admitted: “I’ve shared three false stories in the past month because I didn’t check the channel’s credibility.”

The problem isn’t just bots. It’s human behavior. Telegram’s “forwarded message” feature lets users reshare content an unlimited number of times. Unlike WhatsApp, where you can only forward to five chats at once, Telegram has no limits. A single lie can go viral across continents in minutes.

Dr. Claire Wardle from Harvard’s Kennedy School calls it “the perfect storm for misinformation.” Traditional platforms like Facebook spent years building systems to slow down false content. Telegram never built any.

Newsrooms Are Struggling to Keep Up

Setting up a Telegram channel is easy. Most newsrooms get one running in two days. But managing it? That’s another story.

Al Jazeera’s main channel gets 8,000 comments daily. That’s not a feature-it’s a burden. Telegram doesn’t offer built-in moderation tools. So newsrooms hire teams just to respond to users, flag spam, and verify sources.

Discovery is another challenge. You can’t search for news channels inside the app. You have to find them through external links, QR codes, or word-of-mouth. The Guardian solved this by creating a bot called “News Alerts” that lets users pick which topics they want updates on. Result? 37% higher engagement.

And monetization? Still messy. Telegram introduced revenue sharing for premium subscribers in 2024, but only about 10 million of its 1 billion users pay for Telegram Premium. That means most news channels rely on donations, Patreon links, or sponsored messages-none of which are reliable income streams.

Verified Channels: A Step Toward Accountability

In January 2025, Telegram rolled out “verified channels” for news organizations. To get the blue checkmark, you need official documentation-business license, media credentials, government registration. Over 12,000 channels have been verified in six months.

It’s not perfect. Some fake outlets still slip through. But it’s a start. Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, said in April 2025: “We’re implementing targeted moderation for channels that repeatedly violate basic truthfulness standards, while preserving the open channel ecosystem that makes Telegram valuable for legitimate news.”

That’s the tightrope Telegram walks now. Speed and openness made it powerful. But without accountability, it risks becoming a tool for chaos.

The Future: 1.3 Billion and Beyond

eMarketer predicts Telegram will hit 1.3 billion users by the end of 2026. News channels will account for 35% of daily engagement. That’s not a prediction-it’s a trajectory.

In Venezuela, independent journalists now earn 60-70% of their income through Telegram subscriptions, paid in cryptocurrency. In India, local news channels are replacing WhatsApp groups as the primary source of village-level updates. In the U.S., community radio stations are using Telegram to reach listeners who don’t have smartphones but still want local weather, power outages, and school closures.

The playbook for news distribution has changed. It’s no longer about who controls the press. It’s about who controls the connection. Telegram gave that power back to the publisher-and the audience.

The question now isn’t whether Telegram is the future of news. It already is. The real question is: Can we learn to use it wisely before the noise drowns out the truth?