On February 27th, Durov posted that Channels were becoming a source of unverified information and that the company lacks the ability to check on their veracity. He urged users to be mistrustful of the things shared on Channels, and initially threatened to block the feature in the countries involved for the length of the war, saying that he didn’t want Telegram to be used to aggravate conflict or incite ethnic hatred. He did, however, walk back this plan when it became clear that they had also become a vital communications tool for Ukrainian officials and citizens to help coordinate their resistance and evacuations. Artem Kliuchnikov and his family fled Ukraine just days before the Russian invasion. Friday’s performance was part of a larger shift. For the week, the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq fell 2%, 2.9%, and 3.5%, respectively. On Feb. 27, however, he admitted from his Russian-language account that "Telegram channels are increasingly becoming a source of unverified information related to Ukrainian events." And indeed, volatility has been a hallmark of the market environment so far in 2022, with the S&P 500 still down more than 10% for the year-to-date after first sliding into a correction last month. The CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX, has held at a lofty level of more than 30.
from ar
