Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images Telegram was co-founded by Pavel and Nikolai Durov, the brothers who had previously created VKontakte. VK is Russiaโs equivalent of Facebook, a social network used for public and private messaging, audio and video sharing as well as online gaming. In January, SimpleWeb reported that VK was Russiaโs fourth most-visited website, after Yandex, YouTube and Googleโs Russian-language homepage. In 2016, Forbesโ Michael Solomon described Pavel Durov (pictured, below) as the โMark Zuckerberg of Russia.โ Artem Kliuchnikov and his family fled Ukraine just days before the Russian invasion. 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. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video message on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces "destroy the invaders wherever we can."
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