Pavel Durov, the owner of social media platform Telegram, has criticised French authorities over his arrest in August.
While the investigation is still ongoing, Durov claimed France’s justice department should have approached his company rather than detain him.
Writing on his personal Telegram channel, the Russian-born tech entrepreneur said he was told he “may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram”.
Durov called that “surprising for several reasons”.
Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.
He stressed that Telegram has an official representative in the European Union that accepts and replies to the bloc’s requests, with a publicly available email address.
In addition, he said, as a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai, he previously helped establish a Telegram hotline to address terrorism threats.
Referring to the French actions, he said: “If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.”
Durov added: “Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.”
He further said that striking the right balance between privacy and security was challenging as it required navigating complex laws, regulations, and technological limitations — a process that he said demanded “open dialogue”.
Regarding Iran and Russia, Durov said: “We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated.”
He insisted his company did make strenuous efforts to regulate and moderate where needed.
“All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve,” Durov said.
“But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this or this). We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster.”
Durov added that Telegram had experienced an “abrupt increase in user count to 950 million [users]” and that had caused “growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform”. He pledged to improve the situation and his platform’s operations.
The Telegram owner, who is a French national, was arrested in France in late August as part of an investigation into crimes involving alleged child pornography, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions related to the app.
Telegram boss Pavel Durov has been placed under formal investigation in a probe into organized crime on the messaging app. He was granted bail on condition he pays €5 million, reports twice a week to police, and does not leave French territory. https://t.co/UVW9jxmHQ4
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) August 29, 2024
