Indicted Telegram CEO Pavel Durov hits out at ‘misguided’ arrest

Indicted Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who was arrested in Paris on 24 August in relation to 12 offences connected to management of the popular messaging app, hit out at the French authorities’ “misguided approach” on Thursday in his first public comment since he was detained.

Writing on his own Telegram channel, Durov said it was “surprising” to learn he could be held responsible for other people’s illegal activities on the platform.

“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 said, adding that “no innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools”.

While conceding that an “abrupt increase” in the number of Telegram users to 950 million had caused “growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform”, he stressed the app was not an “anarchic paradise” and that its moderators took down “millions” of harmful posts and channels every day.

He also said that, while French authorities had “numerous ways” to reach him to address any concerns about the app and that Telegram had an official EU representative to deal with law enforcement requests, he would nevertheless make it his “personal goal” to prevent illegal activity on the platform.

Durov was arrested at Paris’ Le Bourget Airport in late August and later charged with administering a platform that permits illicit financial transactions, failure to provide information to the authorities concerning people being sought by the law, complicity in the distribution of child pornography, drug trafficking, organised crime and conspiracy to commit crimes, money laundering, and offering encryption services without the required legal permits. He was freed after posting a €5-million bail bond, and has been prohibited from leaving France.