"Your messages about the movement of the enemy through the official chatbot … bring new trophies every day," the government agency tweeted. 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. 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. Unlike Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter, which run very public anti-disinformation programs, Brooking said: "Telegram is famously lax or absent in its content moderation policy." Ukrainian forces have since put up a strong resistance to the Russian troops amid the war that has left hundreds of Ukrainian civilians, including children, dead, according to the United Nations. Ukrainian and international officials have accused Russia of targeting civilian populations with shelling and bombardments.
from id