Perpetrators of such fraud use various marketing techniques to attract subscribers on their social media channels. 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. But because group chats and the channel features are not end-to-end encrypted, Galperin said user privacy is potentially under threat. The original Telegram channel has expanded into a web of accounts for different locations, including specific pages made for individual Russian cities. There's also an English-language website, which states it is owned by the people who run the Telegram channels. WhatsApp, a rival messaging platform, introduced some measures to counter disinformation when Covid-19 was first sweeping the world.
from fr