Stocks dropped on Friday afternoon, as gains made earlier in the day on hopes for diplomatic progress between Russia and Ukraine turned to losses. Technology stocks were hit particularly hard by higher bond yields. 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. On Feb. 27, however, he admitted from his Russian-language account that "Telegram channels are increasingly becoming a source of unverified information related to Ukrainian events." After fleeing Russia, the brothers founded Telegram as a way to communicate outside the Kremlin's orbit. They now run it from Dubai, and Pavel Durov says it has more than 500 million monthly active users. "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.
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