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. In the past, it was noticed that through bulk SMSes, investors were induced to invest in or purchase the stocks of certain listed companies. In 2018, Russia banned Telegram although it reversed the prohibition two years later. Although some channels have been removed, the curation process is considered opaque and insufficient by analysts. Despite Telegram's origins, its approach to users' security has privacy advocates worried.
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