A dating bot with no age verification just got banned in Kazakhstan, and it’s the same one Russia used to brand Telegram founder Pavel Durov a ‘terrorist’
A court in Kazakhstan banned the Telegram dating chatbot “Daivinchik,” the Kazakhstani news outlet Tengri News reported.
The ban came at the request of the prosecutor’s office, which said the chatbot had no mechanism to verify users’ ages and that minors’ use of the platform led to crimes being committed.
On August 13, a major Telegram outage hit Kazakhstan, though no such access problems were reported globally. Industry experts suggested the outage was an attempt by authorities to block the app, since the messenger remained fully accessible via VPN.
In late July, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was added to the list of terrorists and extremists maintained by Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring). The listing came after Durov was charged with aiding terrorist activity. At the time, Russia’s Investigative Committee cited the chatbot “Daivinchik” as a platform where Ukrainian intelligence services allegedly recruit underage Russians for sabotage.
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