In 2018, Russia banned Telegram although it reversed the prohibition two years later. "We as Ukrainians believe that the truth is on our side, whether it's truth that you're proclaiming about the war and everything else, why would you want to hide it?," he said. Again, in contrast to Facebook, Google and Twitter, Telegram's founder Pavel Durov runs his company in relative secrecy from Dubai. False news often spreads via public groups, or chats, with potentially fatal effects. This ability to mix the public and the private, as well as the ability to use bots to engage with users has proved to be problematic. In early 2021, a database selling phone numbers pulled from Facebook was selling numbers for $20 per lookup. Similarly, security researchers found a network of deepfake bots on the platform that were generating images of people submitted by users to create non-consensual imagery, some of which involved children.
from ar
