"And that set off kind of a battle royale for control of the platform that Durov eventually lost," said Nathalie Maréchal of the Washington advocacy group Ranking Digital Rights. Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, an account on the Telegram messaging platform posing as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged his armed forces to surrender. 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. The S&P 500 fell 1.3% to 4,204.36, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.7% to 32,943.33. The Dow posted a fifth straight weekly loss — its longest losing streak since 2019. The Nasdaq Composite tumbled 2.2% to 12,843.81. Though all three indexes opened in the green, stocks took a turn after a new report showed U.S. consumer sentiment deteriorated more than expected in early March as consumers' inflation expectations soared to the highest since 1981. Again, in contrast to Facebook, Google and Twitter, Telegram's founder Pavel Durov runs his company in relative secrecy from Dubai.
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