Telegram Founder Chastises Facebook & Instagram for Allowing Scams to Thrive

Published at: June 17, 2020

Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, lashes out at Facebook and Instagram for making money off of scammy ads that use Durov’s name and image.

Through his Russian Telegram channel on June 17, Durov accuses the tech giant of turning the deaf ear to user complaints:

“For over a year, Facebook and Instagram have been making money off of advertisements promoting scams that are being launched from my name. <...> These machinations are approved by Facebook’s moderators, which allows them the status of advertisement, thus misleading people.”

Facebook has enough resources for political censorship

One of the scams cited by Durov was a false Gram token offering. Durov also accuses Facebook of double standards, alleging that the moderators are very eager to facilitate political censorship:

“The situation where Facebook for over a year is ignoring complaints, generating revenue from the financial inexperience of users is unacceptable. Considering the speed with which the team of Russian-speaking Facebook moderators is facilitating political censorship (https://sobesednik.ru/politika/20200427-rt-tramp-i-fabrika-trollej-kak), the company have sufficient resources to asses advertisements.”

Durov admonishes Facebook to start paying greater attention to this problem by the end of week; meanwhile urging the users to save scammy ads for a potential future legal battle.

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