It is unclear who runs the account, although Russia's official Ministry of Foreign Affairs Twitter account promoted the Telegram channel on Saturday and claimed it was operated by "a group of experts & journalists." Telegram was founded in 2013 by two Russian brothers, Nikolai and Pavel Durov. During the operations, Sebi officials seized various records and documents, including 34 mobile phones, six laptops, four desktops, four tablets, two hard drive disks and one pen drive from the custody of these persons. This ability to mix the public and the private, as well as the ability to use bots to engage with users has proved to be problematic. In early 2021, a database selling phone numbers pulled from Facebook was selling numbers for $20 per lookup. Similarly, security researchers found a network of deepfake bots on the platform that were generating images of people submitted by users to create non-consensual imagery, some of which involved children. False news often spreads via public groups, or chats, with potentially fatal effects.
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