Censorship took a giant step forward this past month in South Korea, when President Park Geun-Hye made insulting or negative criticism of her a punishable offense.

This includes messages sent from person to person using apps similar to WhatsApp or iMessage, and prosecutors have started monitoring all services for violations.

However, in response to this, South Koreans have moved almost completely to encrypted instant message clients hosted outside their country, such as Telegram, a German app that now boasts 1.5 million new South Korean Users.

According to Telegram’s Markus Ra, “people frequently come to Telegram looking for extra security — some of them from countries with censorship issues.” 

User privacy is one of the biggest issues on the table for massaging apps, and the company that handles it best and puts their users first is likely to become the most successful.