Stocks closed in the red Friday as investors weighed upbeat remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin about diplomatic discussions with Ukraine against a weaker-than-expected print on U.S. consumer sentiment. 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. But the Ukraine Crisis Media Center's Tsekhanovska points out that communications are often down in zones most affected by the war, making this sort of cross-referencing a luxury many cannot afford. Again, in contrast to Facebook, Google and Twitter, Telegram's founder Pavel Durov runs his company in relative secrecy from Dubai. 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.
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