Despite Telegram's origins, its approach to users' security has privacy advocates worried. Just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Durov wrote that Telegram was "increasingly becoming a source of unverified information," and he worried about the app being used to "incite ethnic hatred." You may recall that, back when Facebook started changing WhatsAppโs terms of service, a number of news outlets reported on, and even recommended, switching to Telegram. Pavel Durov even said that users should delete WhatsApp โunless you are cool with all of your photos and messages becoming public one day.โ But Telegram canโt be described as a more-secure version of WhatsApp. Although some channels have been removed, the curation process is considered opaque and insufficient by analysts. The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are โprivate amongst their participants,โ 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.
from id
