Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, an account on the Telegram messaging platform posing as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged his armed forces to surrender. You may recall that, back when Facebook started changing WhatsApp’s terms of service, a number of news outlets reported on, and even recommended, switching to Telegram. Pavel Durov even said that users should delete WhatsApp “unless you are cool with all of your photos and messages becoming public one day.” But Telegram can’t be described as a more-secure version of WhatsApp. 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. 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. Telegram was founded in 2013 by two Russian brothers, Nikolai and Pavel Durov.
from ru
