Unlike Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter, which run very public anti-disinformation programs, Brooking said: "Telegram is famously lax or absent in its content moderation policy." Some people used the platform to organize ahead of the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, and last month Senator Mark Warner sent a letter to Durov urging him to curb Russian information operations on Telegram. Perpetrators of such fraud use various marketing techniques to attract subscribers on their social media channels. 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.” Sebi said data, emails and other documents are being retrieved from the seized devices and detailed investigation is in progress.
from ar