The vast majority of Ukrainians use the Telegram messenger. For most people, it is still the tool they use to get news, despite its well-known Russian origin. This causes constant discussions, security doubts, and proposals to limit or ban its use.
Pavel Durov, the founder of the platform, is also well known. However, almost no one thinks about who is publicly commenting on these accusations against the messenger, who is speaking to the public on behalf of the company.
We became interested in this issue because of the developments after February 14, when at first a representative of the Main Intelligence Directorate, Andriy Yusov, said, among other things, at an event at the Media Center Ukraine:
As far as Telegram is concerned, the threats are real and valid. It’s not about individual users or individual media that are represented on this platform – it’s about the platform itself. It contains a number of threats to information and not only information security in our country. So yes, this is a question that needs to be answered. And I think it will definitely happen.
On February 15, Telegram representative Remy Wong said in a letter to LIGA.net that the messenger “is and always has been safe for Ukrainians and users around the world.”
Telegram was created specifically to protect users from Russian surveillance. Its founder was expelled from Russia even before Telegram was released for protecting Ukrainians’ data (during Euromaidan – Ed.). Telegram is and always has been safe for Ukrainians and users around the world
We became interested in the identity of Remy Wong because we could not find any photographs of him. We found out that his name sounds like Remi Vaughn in English and that it is more correct to write Remi Vaughn in Ukrainian.
A simple and advanced search using various methods gave us mentions only of cases when this person wrote to media outlets to provide some information on behalf of Telegram. This applied to both Ukrainian and global media.
For example, The League , Detector Media , Nashe Vremya, Antikor, CNBC, Politico.
Using ChatGPT with the corresponding request in a special plugin did not help us either.
I could not find any photos of Remy Vaughn, the Telegram spokesperson, in the search results. It seems that there may be no publicly available photos of him on the internet, or they may not be easily accessible through a simple web search. If there are specific images, they may not be indexed by simple search queries or may be kept private.
the neural network’s response.
We have sent a request to the messenger’s press service through the contacts listed on the website and will publish a response.
At the moment, we consider it extremely strange that such a powerful company is being spoken for by essentially anonymous individuals. This makes the distrust of this platform even greater. And the answers published in the media are quite dubious and possibly fake.
If we made a mistake, we will publish an apology and a retraction.
