Telegram was founded in 2013 by two Russian brothers, Nikolai and Pavel Durov. Despite Telegram's origins, its approach to users' security has privacy advocates worried. "Your messages about the movement of the enemy through the official chatbot … bring new trophies every day," the government agency tweeted. The channel appears to be part of the broader information war that has developed following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin has paid Russian TikTok influencers to push propaganda, according to a Vice News investigation, while ProPublica found that fake Russian fact check videos had been viewed over a million times on Telegram. 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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