Pavel Durov, Telegram's CEO, is known as "the Russian Mark Zuckerberg," for co-founding VKontakte, which is Russian for "in touch," a Facebook imitator that became the country's most popular social networking site. "Like the bombing of the maternity ward in Mariupol," he said, "Even before it hits the news, you see the videos on the Telegram channels." This provided opportunity to their linked entities to offload their shares at higher prices and make significant profits at the cost of unsuspecting retail investors. Although some channels have been removed, the curation process is considered opaque and insufficient by analysts. But the Ukraine Crisis Media Center's Tsekhanovska points out that communications are often down in zones most affected by the war, making this sort of cross-referencing a luxury many cannot afford.
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