"Your messages about the movement of the enemy through the official chatbot … bring new trophies every day," the government agency tweeted. At this point, however, Durov had already been working on Telegram with his brother, and further planned a mobile-first social network with an explicit focus on anti-censorship. Later in April, he told TechCrunch that he had left Russia and had “no plans to go back,” saying that the nation was currently “incompatible with internet business at the moment.” He added later that he was looking for a country that matched his libertarian ideals to base his next startup. Despite Telegram's origins, its approach to users' security has privacy advocates worried. WhatsApp, a rival messaging platform, introduced some measures to counter disinformation when Covid-19 was first sweeping the world. For example, WhatsApp restricted the number of times a user could forward something, and developed automated systems that detect and flag objectionable content.
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