In March 2022, Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro had most-subscribed Telegram channel in Brazil (Jair M. Bolsonaro 1) with around 1.23 million subscribers in the platform. The official channel for tips on Telegram followed in second place with around half the number of the followers of the president's channel. Telegram is used by more than 67 percent of Brazilians
for exchanging text messages and accessing channels, the last as an exclusive feature to the app when compared to other messengers in Brazil.
Challenging Meta's hegemony
Although WhatsApp is used by more than 90 percent of Brazilian internet users,
Telegram is now present on 60 percent of the smartphones in the country, turning it into a direct competitor against the Meta-owned messenger and other platforms. Used by around 55 percent of the Brazil's internet users, Telegram generated around
6.6 million downloads in Brazil during the second quarter of 2022, one of the highest download figures registered after a peak of 12.8 million downloads in the first quarter of 2021.
Elections and disinformation
After a court order from the Brazilian Supreme Court that almost suspended the app, Telegram has stated that would monitor its 100 biggest channels to combat the spread of fake news during the general elections in the country. Although the list was kept under investigation secrecy, the platform informed that these channels represent more than 95 percent of all the views in the country.
With the turmoil expected for the upcoming general election in Brazil in October 2022, around 81 percent of respondents of a March 2022 survey in Brazil claimed that social media platforms and messaging apps should remove fake news content, while more than half of those agreed that messaging apps
should be taken down if they disobeyed a court order to avoid the spread of such content. The polarized political atmosphere in Brazil also made users of several social media
stop talking about politics on these platforms.