Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, an account on the Telegram messaging platform posing as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged his armed forces to surrender. The gold standard of encryption, known as end-to-end encryption, where only the sender and person who receives the message are able to see it, is available on Telegram only when the Secret Chat function is enabled. Voice and video calls are also completely encrypted. At its heart, Telegram is little more than a messaging app like WhatsApp or Signal. But it also offers open channels that enable a single user, or a group of users, to communicate with large numbers in a method similar to a Twitter account. This has proven to be both a blessing and a curse for Telegram and its users, since these channels can be used for both good and ill. Right now, as Wired reports, the app is a key way for Ukrainians to receive updates from the government during the invasion. Messages are not fully encrypted by default. That means the company could, in theory, access the content of the messages, or be forced to hand over the data at the request of a government. Friday’s performance was part of a larger shift. For the week, the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq fell 2%, 2.9%, and 3.5%, respectively.
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