The War on Fakes channel has repeatedly attempted to push conspiracies that footage from Ukraine is somehow being falsified. One post on the channel from February 24 claimed without evidence that a widely viewed photo of a Ukrainian woman injured in an airstrike in the city of Chuhuiv was doctored and that the woman was seen in a different photo days later without injuries. The post, which has over 600,000 views, also baselessly claimed that the woman's blood was actually makeup or grape juice. Now safely in France with his spouse and three of his children, Kliuchnikov scrolls through Telegram to learn about the devastation happening in his home country. "He has kind of an old-school cyber-libertarian world view where technology is there to set you free," Maréchal said. Asked about its stance on disinformation, Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told AFP: "As noted by our CEO, the sheer volume of information being shared on channels makes it extremely difficult to verify, so it's important that users double-check what they read." Unlike Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter, which run very public anti-disinformation programs, Brooking said: "Telegram is famously lax or absent in its content moderation policy."
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