"And that set off kind of a battle royale for control of the platform that Durov eventually lost," said Nathalie Maréchal of the Washington advocacy group Ranking Digital Rights. The news also helped traders look past another report showing decades-high inflation and shake off some of the volatility from recent sessions. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' February Consumer Price Index (CPI) this week showed another surge in prices even before Russia escalated its attacks in Ukraine. The headline CPI — soaring 7.9% over last year — underscored the sticky inflationary pressures reverberating across the U.S. economy, with everything from groceries to rents and airline fares getting more expensive for everyday consumers. It is unclear who runs the account, although Russia's official Ministry of Foreign Affairs Twitter account promoted the Telegram channel on Saturday and claimed it was operated by "a group of experts & journalists." This ability to mix the public and the private, as well as the ability to use bots to engage with users has proved to be problematic. In early 2021, a database selling phone numbers pulled from Facebook was selling numbers for $20 per lookup. Similarly, security researchers found a network of deepfake bots on the platform that were generating images of people submitted by users to create non-consensual imagery, some of which involved children. Telegram, which does little policing of its content, has also became a hub for Russian propaganda and misinformation. Many pro-Kremlin channels have become popular, alongside accounts of journalists and other independent observers.
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