Overall, extreme levels of fear in the market seems to have morphed into something more resembling concern. For example, the Cboe Volatility Index fell from its 2022 peak of 36, which it hit Monday, to around 30 on Friday, a sign of easing tensions. Meanwhile, while the price of WTI crude oil slipped from Sunday’s multiyear high $130 of barrel to $109 a pop. Markets have been expecting heavy restrictions on Russian oil, some of which the U.S. has already imposed, and that would reduce the global supply and bring about even more burdensome inflation. 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." Just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Durov wrote that Telegram was "increasingly becoming a source of unverified information," and he worried about the app being used to "incite ethnic hatred." Telegram users are able to send files of any type up to 2GB each and access them from any device, with no limit on cloud storage, which has made downloading files more popular on the platform. 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.
from nl
