"There is a significant risk of insider threat or hacking of Telegram systems that could expose all of these chats to the Russian government," said Eva Galperin with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has called for Telegram to improve its privacy practices. Official government accounts have also spread fake fact checks. An official Twitter account for the Russia diplomatic mission in Geneva shared a fake debunking video claiming without evidence that "Western and Ukrainian media are creating thousands of fake news on Russia every day." The video, which has amassed almost 30,000 views, offered a "how-to" spot misinformation. Messages are not fully encrypted by default. That means the company could, in theory, access the content of the messages, or be forced to hand over the data at the request of a government. "And that set off kind of a battle royale for control of the platform that Durov eventually lost," said Nathalie Maréchal of the Washington advocacy group Ranking Digital Rights. 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.
from ar
