In February 2014, the Ukrainian people ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, prompting Russia to invade and annex the Crimean peninsula. By the start of April, Pavel Durov had given his notice, with TechCrunch saying at the time that the CEO had resisted pressure to suppress pages criticizing the Russian government. Now safely in France with his spouse and three of his children, Kliuchnikov scrolls through Telegram to learn about the devastation happening in his home country. "There is a significant risk of insider threat or hacking of Telegram systems that could expose all of these chats to the Russian government," said Eva Galperin with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has called for Telegram to improve its privacy practices. Telegram users are able to send files of any type up to 2GB each and access them from any device, with no limit on cloud storage, which has made downloading files more popular on the platform. 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."
from cn