Oh no. There’s a certain degree of myth-making around what exactly went on, so take everything that follows lightly. Telegram was originally launched as a side project by the Durov brothers, with Nikolai handling the coding and Pavel as CEO, while both were at VK. "Russians are really disconnected from the reality of what happening to their country," Andrey said. "So Telegram has become essential for understanding what's going on to the Russian-speaking world." DFR Lab sent the image through Microsoft Azure's Face Verification program and found that it was "highly unlikely" that the person in the second photo was the same as the first woman. The fact-checker Logically AI also found the claim to be false. The woman, Olena Kurilo, was also captured in a video after the airstrike and shown to have the injuries. The Security Service of Ukraine said in a tweet that it was able to effectively target Russian convoys near Kyiv because of messages sent to an official Telegram bot account called "STOP Russian War." 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.
from ar
