In 2014, Pavel Durov fled the country after allies of the Kremlin took control of the social networking site most know just as VK. Russia's intelligence agency had asked Durov to turn over the data of anti-Kremlin protesters. Durov refused to do so. Official government accounts have also spread fake fact checks. An official Twitter account for the Russia diplomatic mission in Geneva shared a fake debunking video claiming without evidence that "Western and Ukrainian media are creating thousands of fake news on Russia every day." The video, which has amassed almost 30,000 views, offered a "how-to" spot misinformation. Again, in contrast to Facebook, Google and Twitter, Telegram's founder Pavel Durov runs his company in relative secrecy from Dubai. 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." Recently, Durav wrote on his Telegram channel that users' right to privacy, in light of the war in Ukraine, is "sacred, now more than ever."
from tw
