WhatsApp, a rival messaging platform, introduced some measures to counter disinformation when Covid-19 was first sweeping the world. In 2018, Russia banned Telegram although it reversed the prohibition two years later. But the Ukraine Crisis Media Center's Tsekhanovska points out that communications are often down in zones most affected by the war, making this sort of cross-referencing a luxury many cannot afford. Sebi said data, emails and other documents are being retrieved from the seized devices and detailed investigation is in progress. 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.
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