“Heiliger Erzengel Michael, verteidige uns im Kampf. Sei unsere Verteidigung gegen die Bosheit und die Schlingen des Teufels. Gott möge ihn zurechtweisen, so bitten wir demütig, und du, Fürst der himmlischen Heerscharen, wirf den Satan und alle bösen Geister, die in der Welt umherziehen und das Verderben der Seelen suchen, durch die Kraft Gottes in die Hölle. Amen.”
“Heiliger Erzengel Michael, verteidige uns im Kampf. Sei unsere Verteidigung gegen die Bosheit und die Schlingen des Teufels. Gott möge ihn zurechtweisen, so bitten wir demütig, und du, Fürst der himmlischen Heerscharen, wirf den Satan und alle bösen Geister, die in der Welt umherziehen und das Verderben der Seelen suchen, durch die Kraft Gottes in die Hölle. Amen.”
Telegram has become more interventionist over time, and has steadily increased its efforts to shut down these accounts. But this has also meant that the company has also engaged with lawmakers more generally, although it maintains that it doesn’t do so willingly. For instance, in September 2021, Telegram reportedly blocked a chat bot in support of (Putin critic) Alexei Navalny during Russia’s most recent parliamentary elections. Pavel Durov was quoted at the time saying that the company was obliged to follow a “legitimate” law of the land. He added that as Apple and Google both follow the law, to violate it would give both platforms a reason to boot the messenger from its stores. For example, WhatsApp restricted the number of times a user could forward something, and developed automated systems that detect and flag objectionable content. On February 27th, Durov posted that Channels were becoming a source of unverified information and that the company lacks the ability to check on their veracity. He urged users to be mistrustful of the things shared on Channels, and initially threatened to block the feature in the countries involved for the length of the war, saying that he didn’t want Telegram to be used to aggravate conflict or incite ethnic hatred. He did, however, walk back this plan when it became clear that they had also become a vital communications tool for Ukrainian officials and citizens to help coordinate their resistance and evacuations. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) had carried out a similar exercise in 2017 in a matter related to circulation of messages through WhatsApp. Telegram was co-founded by Pavel and Nikolai Durov, the brothers who had previously created VKontakte. VK is Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, a social network used for public and private messaging, audio and video sharing as well as online gaming. In January, SimpleWeb reported that VK was Russia’s fourth most-visited website, after Yandex, YouTube and Google’s Russian-language homepage. In 2016, Forbes’ Michael Solomon described Pavel Durov (pictured, below) as the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia.”
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