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Will Telegram’s uncompromising privacy policy survive founder Pavel Durov’s arrest?
Pavel Durov’s detention in France has raised multiple questions about how to strike the balance between the right to privacy and on online platform’s moral and legal duty to moderate content and crackdown on illegal activities. One charge being levelled at the Telegram founder is the app’s laissez-faire attitude to moderating content shared in private chats and private groups, which have allegedly made the platform a powerful tool for terrorists, political extremists, drug dealers and paedophiles.
Cyber security experts from NortonLifeLock, now part of Gen Digital Inc., found private channels in 2021 in which criminals sold clandestine coronavirus vaccines, personal bank details and networks of thousands of bots. He famously refused to give the Russian secret services the personal data of Ukrainian activists taking part in the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv in 2013 and 2014 when he was the CEO of social media platform VK, but a lot has changed since then. The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has 2 million subscribers on his channel, for example, while the late leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, also used Telegram to post messages critical of Russia’s military leadership and to announce his ill-fated “march for justice” on the Russian capital last year.
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