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." Given the pro-privacy stance of the platform, it’s taken as a given that it’ll be used for a number of reasons, not all of them good. And Telegram has been attached to a fair few scandals related to terrorism, sexual exploitation and crime. Back in 2015, Vox described Telegram as “ISIS’ app of choice,” saying that the platform’s real use is the ability to use channels to distribute material to large groups at once. Telegram has acted to remove public channels affiliated with terrorism, but Pavel Durov reiterated that he had no business snooping on private conversations. WhatsApp, a rival messaging platform, introduced some measures to counter disinformation when Covid-19 was first sweeping the world. 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. Ukrainian forces have since put up a strong resistance to the Russian troops amid the war that has left hundreds of Ukrainian civilians, including children, dead, according to the United Nations. Ukrainian and international officials have accused Russia of targeting civilian populations with shelling and bombardments.
from sg
