Or was it really WhatsApp?

About a month ago a website called iGuides made an article about how Telegram is degrading.

Today Pavel Durov made a post[ru] in his Russian channel with screenshots of two Telegram channels with identical criticism of Telegram. He claims these posts are paid for by WhatsApp and that it's WhatsApp's campaign against Telegram.

iGuides authors noticed[ru] that the text and images from these posts are stolen from them. The title from the iGuides' article noticing the issue words it as if WhatsApp itself indeed has stolen their content for their promotion materials. I would disagree that this is likely. The rest of the article doesn't claim so, though, and just recites Durov.

One of the iGuides authors notes[ru] (seems to be their personal channel, I can't find the source from the screenshot) that the two channels on screenshots are just content farms that never produce anything original. I agree with this analysis.

Now I will have to be a bit rhetorical here, but do you really think WhatsApp's marketing people would buy negative PR posts on content farms using stolen material? Durov only provided two examples, and I can't extrapolate that this is a massive PR attack just from this.

It would be easier to explain it with content farms, in their typical fashion, simply stealing content from iGuides. By the way, both channels seem to be related, as they have the same account specified as "Manager".


Now why would Durov post this then?

a) He just wants to look better in the eyes of investors, especially considering an IPO is probably coming[ru];

b) Durov is getting more and more detached from the reality by the day, preferring to draw a conspiracy theory over accepting valid criticism;

c) This is genuinely a massive PR attack and Durov is bad at proving his position.
e.g. There's still a chance iGuides was contracted by Facebook* to write the article too, that gets reused for other promotional materials, and they wouldn't admit this is the case and would rather say the article was plagiarized. But this would mean jumping through a lot of hoops for Facebook*, and iGuides' behavior doesn't check out here, because if this was indeed marketing material they were contracted for, they would unlikely bring public attention to plagiarism here.
Or maybe the mentioned channels were paid for any negative PR and the channel admins were left with the task of writing the message on their own, and they just plagiarized it, like they typically do. I should note this option is very unlikely though, because advertisers very rarely leave writing the text to the publishing channel.

Also note that Meta was labeled as a terrorist company in Russia and it's extremely dangerous for any Russian to have any financial ties with them. I doubt iGuides or the mentioned channel admins would agree to this.

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Additional notes: "Jobs' iPhone" channel post (11th of March, 5:44 UTC), "Apple News" channel post (11th of March, 7:06 UTC, Deleted 10th of May, 16:53 UTC)