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DRAFTWEXNEW Telegram | DID YOU KNOW?
Date: | DRAFTWEXNEW
"For Telegram, accountability has always been a problem, which is why it was so popular even before the full-scale war with far-right extremists and terrorists from all over the world," she told AFP from her safe house outside the Ukrainian capital. The War on Fakes channel has repeatedly attempted to push conspiracies that footage from Ukraine is somehow being falsified. One post on the channel from February 24 claimed without evidence that a widely viewed photo of a Ukrainian woman injured in an airstrike in the city of Chuhuiv was doctored and that the woman was seen in a different photo days later without injuries. The post, which has over 600,000 views, also baselessly claimed that the woman's blood was actually makeup or grape juice. In addition, Telegram's architecture limits the ability to slow the spread of false information: the lack of a central public feed, and the fact that comments are easily disabled in channels, reduce the space for public pushback. The account, "War on Fakes," was created on February 24, the same day Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a "special military operation" and troops began invading Ukraine. The page is rife with disinformation, according to The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which studies digital extremism and published a report examining the channel. "There are a lot of things that Telegram could have been doing this whole time. And they know exactly what they are and they've chosen not to do them. That's why I don't trust them," she said.
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