Now safely in France with his spouse and three of his children, Kliuchnikov scrolls through Telegram to learn about the devastation happening in his home country. But because group chats and the channel features are not end-to-end encrypted, Galperin said user privacy is potentially under threat. But Kliuchnikov, the Ukranian now in France, said he will use Signal or WhatsApp for sensitive conversations, but questions around privacy on Telegram do not give him pause when it comes to sharing information about the war. In December 2021, Sebi officials had conducted a search and seizure operation at the premises of certain persons carrying out similar manipulative activities through Telegram channels. The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform.
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