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. He adds: "Telegram has become my primary news source." For example, WhatsApp restricted the number of times a user could forward something, and developed automated systems that detect and flag objectionable content. False news often spreads via public groups, or chats, with potentially fatal effects. Although some channels have been removed, the curation process is considered opaque and insufficient by analysts.
from ar
