🚢🛢️ A number of coastal states of the Baltic and North Seas (🇬🇧UK, 🇩🇰Denmark, 🇸🇪Sweden, 🇫🇮Finland, 🇵🇱Poland and 🇪🇪Estonia) have agreed on joint measures to combat the Russian shadow fleet. The group will conduct regular inspections of shadow fleet vessels, — Finnish MFA
🚢🛢️ A number of coastal states of the Baltic and North Seas (🇬🇧UK, 🇩🇰Denmark, 🇸🇪Sweden, 🇫🇮Finland, 🇵🇱Poland and 🇪🇪Estonia) have agreed on joint measures to combat the Russian shadow fleet. The group will conduct regular inspections of shadow fleet vessels, — Finnish MFA
Although some channels have been removed, the curation process is considered opaque and insufficient by analysts. Telegram has become more interventionist over time, and has steadily increased its efforts to shut down these accounts. But this has also meant that the company has also engaged with lawmakers more generally, although it maintains that it doesn’t do so willingly. For instance, in September 2021, Telegram reportedly blocked a chat bot in support of (Putin critic) Alexei Navalny during Russia’s most recent parliamentary elections. Pavel Durov was quoted at the time saying that the company was obliged to follow a “legitimate” law of the land. He added that as Apple and Google both follow the law, to violate it would give both platforms a reason to boot the messenger from its stores. Channels are not fully encrypted, end-to-end. All communications on a Telegram channel can be seen by anyone on the channel and are also visible to Telegram. Telegram may be asked by a government to hand over the communications from a channel. Telegram has a history of standing up to Russian government requests for data, but how comfortable you are relying on that history to predict future behavior is up to you. Because Telegram has this data, it may also be stolen by hackers or leaked by an internal employee. 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. 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.”
from ca
