Artem Kliuchnikov and his family fled Ukraine just days before the Russian invasion. The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are βprivate amongst their participants,β but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. Continuing its crackdown against entities allegedly involved in a front-running scam using messaging app Telegram, Sebi on Thursday carried out search and seizure operations at the premises of eight entities in multiple locations across the country. As the war in Ukraine rages, the messaging app Telegram has emerged as the go-to place for unfiltered live war updates for both Ukrainian refugees and increasingly isolated Russians alike. Individual messages can be fully encrypted. But the user has to turn on that function. It's not automatic, as it is on Signal and WhatsApp.
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