"He has kind of an old-school cyber-libertarian world view where technology is there to set you free," Maréchal said. As a result, the pandemic saw many newcomers to Telegram, including prominent anti-vaccine activists who used the app's hands-off approach to share false information on shots, a study from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows. The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” 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. Update March 8, 2022: EFF has clarified that Channels and Groups are not fully encrypted, end-to-end, updated our post to link to Telegram’s FAQ for Cloud and Secret chats, updated to clarify that auto-delete is available for group and channel admins, and added some additional links. 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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