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✦ 🍒 ⩇⩇ - ᗰ᥆tꪱ᥎α᥉ꪱ ɦᥲɾꪱᥲᥒ ﹆ׂׂ ˖ ◗ Telegram | DID YOU KNOW?
Date: | ✦ 🍒 ⩇⩇ - ᗰ᥆tꪱ᥎α᥉ꪱ ɦᥲɾꪱᥲᥒ ﹆ׂׂ ˖ ◗
A Russian Telegram channel with over 700,000 followers is spreading disinformation about Russia's invasion of Ukraine under the guise of providing "objective information" and fact-checking fake news. Its influence extends beyond the platform, with major Russian publications, government officials, and journalists citing the page's posts. The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. But the Ukraine Crisis Media Center's Tsekhanovska points out that communications are often down in zones most affected by the war, making this sort of cross-referencing a luxury many cannot afford. Perpetrators of such fraud use various marketing techniques to attract subscribers on their social media channels. On December 23rd, 2020, Pavel Durov posted to his channel that the company would need to start generating revenue. In early 2021, he added that any advertising on the platform would not use user data for targeting, and that it would be focused on “large one-to-many channels.” He pledged that ads would be “non-intrusive” and that most users would simply not notice any change.
✦ 🍒 ⩇⩇ - ᗰ᥆tꪱ᥎α᥉ꪱ ɦᥲɾꪱᥲᥒ ﹆ׂׂ ˖ ◗ from NL