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Telegram | DID YOU KNOW?
Pavel Durov, a billionaire who embraces an all-black wardrobe and is often compared to the character Neo from "the Matrix," funds Telegram through his personal wealth and debt financing. And despite being one of the world's most popular tech companies, Telegram reportedly has only about 30 employees who defer to Durov for most major decisions about the platform. 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. 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. "We as Ukrainians believe that the truth is on our side, whether it's truth that you're proclaiming about the war and everything else, why would you want to hide it?," he said. 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.
from FR