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. Some people used the platform to organize ahead of the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, and last month Senator Mark Warner sent a letter to Durov urging him to curb Russian information operations on Telegram. For example, WhatsApp restricted the number of times a user could forward something, and developed automated systems that detect and flag objectionable content. Artem Kliuchnikov and his family fled Ukraine just days before the Russian invasion. "He has kind of an old-school cyber-libertarian world view where technology is there to set you free," Maréchal said.
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