"There is a significant risk of insider threat or hacking of Telegram systems that could expose all of these chats to the Russian government," said Eva Galperin with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has called for Telegram to improve its privacy practices. 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. Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, an account on the Telegram messaging platform posing as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged his armed forces to surrender. At this point, however, Durov had already been working on Telegram with his brother, and further planned a mobile-first social network with an explicit focus on anti-censorship. Later in April, he told TechCrunch that he had left Russia and had “no plans to go back,” saying that the nation was currently “incompatible with internet business at the moment.” He added later that he was looking for a country that matched his libertarian ideals to base his next startup. WhatsApp, a rival messaging platform, introduced some measures to counter disinformation when Covid-19 was first sweeping the world.
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