Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, an account on the Telegram messaging platform posing as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged his armed forces to surrender. False news often spreads via public groups, or chats, with potentially fatal effects. In the United States, Telegram's lower public profile has helped it mostly avoid high level scrutiny from Congress, but it has not gone unnoticed. In a message on his Telegram channel recently recounting the episode, Durov wrote: "I lost my company and my home, but would do it again – without hesitation." 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.
from us
