From "the Analyst"
TELEGRAM AND RUSSIA
The arrest of Pavel Durov in Paris has sent waves of fury through Moscow.
Durov, Telegram founder, fled to the UAE in 2014. Durov has joint French-Emirati Citizenship having apparently given up his Russian citizenship.
So why was he arrested? Basically Telegram has a dark side - a very dark side - ranging from the worst kind of pornography to drug dealing. France claims he’s been arrested for failing to cooperate in dealing with these issues.
We also know that Telegram was used to facilitate the recent riots in the UK.
On top of that Telegram is widely used by Russia for military communications. So much so that Ukrainian soldiers are banned from using it to communicate.
Durov is no longer the sole owner of the platform either. The Moscow based Sogov Group - who have close ties to the Kremlin also hold a sizeable stake in the company.
If you weren’t aware, just about every other platform - Signal being the nearest to it for example, was banned in Russia. Yet despite Durov not being a Russian citizen and having been on the exiled list, it seems we have a touch of what’s known as Hotel California Syndrome going on - ‘you can check out, but you can never leave’. Durov may have checked out of Russia but did he ever - could he ever leave? Truly, fully leave?
Moscow seems to think not. Paris has been humming with Russian diplomatic efforts to get access to him. Why if he doesn’t matter to them? Even Russian press has been lauding him as some kind of hero and almost as a hostage to western imperialism. Yet he’s not even a citizen anymore.
I don’t know how many of you were aware of how heavily Russian controlled the platform is indirectly - I thought it was common knowledge. Apparently not so much. I chose to use it because of that, because it was in effect using Russian resources to get to Russians - we have a few trolls who come here all the time - I know who they are - you can see them when they make their emojis for the opposite of what anyone else would emote about.
Using Telegram is a way to get news to Russian sources both good and bad.
Do I like the fact that it has such a dark side? No. But then in their own way every single social media platform going has something wrong with it. Some like X are especially poor, but others like Facebook will take money from anyone to ply their lies and fraudulent schemes. TikTok is little more than a Chinese data mining platform.
You have to exploit them as much as they want to exploit you.
Russia providing the platform to discuss its own destruction at the hands of the nation it invaded? Sounds like a bargain to me.
@ukrainejournal