Artem Kliuchnikov and his family fled Ukraine just days before the Russian invasion. 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. Telegram, which does little policing of its content, has also became a hub for Russian propaganda and misinformation. Many pro-Kremlin channels have become popular, alongside accounts of journalists and other independent observers. 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. 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 tw
