Durov's Knot: Telegram beyond East and West

The unexpected detention of Pavel Durov in Paris became one of the most high-profile events of August, sparking a storm of discussions in leading global media, as well as in Russian-language media and the blogosphere. Durov is the creator of Russia's second-largest social network, VKontakte, which was taken from him by the Kremlin 10 years ago, and Telegram, the third-largest, which has now grown into a global platform with nearly a billion users worldwide.

Telegram is used by the military to coordinate their actions on the battlefield, oppositionists use it to plan protests, subjects of authoritarian regimes to receive information that bypasses censorship, while those very regimes use it for propaganda,child porn enthusiasts get what they need, officials leak compromising material on each other, security forces stage provocations and recruit agents, crypto scammers and fraudsters carry out transactions. In addition, Telegram is very convenient as a messenger and for creating communities of different scales.

The Telegram case brings together different understandings of freedom, unfreedom, law and ethics, characteristic of developed countries of the West and developing countries of the East, autocracies and democracies. The main features of Telegram — anonymity, non-censorship and non-transparency — are in demand by everyone, including those who in reality oppose each other. But they are in demand in different situations and for different purposes. This explains both the incredible growth in the popularity of the platform and the geography of this popularity, and the fact that Durov, who has fled the authoritarian Russian authorities, is ready to be protected by these same authorities at a time when the gendarmerie of democratic France is threatening to arrest him.

Understanding Durov’s case is not about condemning or defending him but rather about trying to untangle the knot of white, black and grey threads that make up this mess – a knot that reflects the contradictory realities of today's world.

Telegram is unusual not only as a platform combining the functions of social media and a messenger but also as a business model. The app has secured its place in the top tier of global internet services by user count. At the same time, its owner, Pavel Durov, maintains full control over the company, sticking to a debt-financing strategy and avoiding large investors.

The platform's uncensored nature and minimal moderation contribute to Telegram's growing popularity, especially in developing countries, but at the same time, they cause irritation among both authoritarian and democratic governments, albeit for different reasons. As a result, the platform is blocked in several authoritarian countries, and a growing number of democracies see it as a threat to public order.

The Russian authorities have chosen a peculiarly pragmatic strategy in this regard. Having failed in their attempts to block Telegram, they have learned to use the service for their own purposes, believing that at this stage it is more profitable than seeking control over the platform or technically banning it. For now, the interests of the Russian authorities and the service's owner do not contradict each other.

The main question facing Telegram is whether Durov can continue to grow the service's user base by attracting them with the advantages of anarchic uncensored communication and opacity, especially in unregulated developing countries, while also capitalising on the open market in Western countries, which requires compliance with laws and regulations. Durov has sought to avoid making this choice for as long as possible, but the French legal process is likely to force him to lean one way or the other.

Ideology or business model?

The unexpected detention of Pavel Durov in Paris has cast doubt on the future of Telegram, one of the most colourful and controversial information products of recent years. It sparked a storm of controversy and prompted reflection on its extraordinary phenomenon.

Founded in 2013, Telegram has transformed into one of the world's largest social platforms over 10 years, with nearly a billion users. In 2014, the service had 50 million users and then doubled that number every two years for six years. The leap from 400 to 800 million took three years, and from July 2023 to July 2024, Telegram gained another 150 million users, according to statistics from demandsage.com.

Number of active Telegram users per month, 2014-2024, million people

The highest number of Telegram mobile app downloads in 2023 was recorded in India (84 million), followed by Russia (35 million), the United States (30 million), Indonesia (24 million), Brazil (23 million), Vietnam (17.5 million), Ukraine (12 million), and Kazakhstan (9 million), according to demandsage.com.This totals 205 million, or 50% of all app downloads in 2023. France accounted for 7.5 million downloads, the United Kingdom for 6 million, and Italy for 4 million. Although Telegram’s European market is growing rapidly, it is primarily a messenger for developing countries – users from developed countries make up less than 20% of its total user base.

The platform's incredible success is attributed to two factors: the unique combination of messenger and social network features, and, most importantly, its opacity when it comes to government authorities and extremely lenient content moderation policy. This latter feature can be viewed either as an ideology or as a specific business strategy.

Despite rapidly increasing its user base, Telegram has yet to turn a profit. According to the Financial Times, the company posted a total loss of $173 million on revenue of $342 million in 2023. Durov, having been forced to sell his previous large-scale project, the social network VKontakte, has refused to sell Telegram either fully or partially, despite receiving offers exceeding $30 billion. For comparison, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum followed a more traditional model: he attracted venture capital and sold the service to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, six years after its founding.

Durov, on the other hand, has relied on debt financing, raising a total of over $2.3 billion with a maturity date in March 2026. In the absence of a large partner investor, comparable to Facebook, who could grow the service's user base through scale, Durov has had to attract users by other means.The platform's uncensored nature and weak content moderation provide Telegram with a unique niche. These platform features, which its management insists on, are not just an ideological stance but also part of its business strategy. At the same time, the incredible success in Russia of Durov's first brainchild, the social network VKontakte, was largely based on the same feature: complete tolerance of content sharing that circumvented copyright restrictions.

Business anarchism between East and West

Durov's business anarchism creates two types of problems – political on the one hand, and criminal and ethical on the other. Authoritarian regimes are unsettled by the platform's lack of censorship. Telegram has been blocked in China since 2015, in Pakistan for state-owned Internet provider subscribers since 2017, and in Iran since 2018, after the messenger became a primary tool for coordinating opposition protests there. For the same reason, the messenger was blocked in Thailand, and certain Telegram channels were labelled ‘extremist’ in Belarus. Russian authorities attempted to block Telegram for two years.

The second type of problem involves accusations that the platform is used for drug trafficking, distributing child pornography, coordinating terrorist attacks, recruiting militants, fraud, and other crimes. These issues led to Durov’s detention at the Paris airport. From 2013 to 2024, French authorities sent 2460 requests to Telegram, which went unanswered, according to the newspaper Liberation.

Outside of France, similar complaints about Telegram's policies have been raised by authorities in the UK, Brazil, Indonesia, and Spain. Indian authorities investigated fraud and other offences committed using the platform and launched a new investigation following Durov's detention in France. In March 2023, Norway banned the use of Telegram and TikTok on government employees' work devices, stating that the service could pose a national security threat. While German authorities accused Telegram of insufficient cooperation: in 2022, Germany considered blocking the messenger due to channels spreading hate speech but ultimately imposed a €5 million fine instead.

Telegram still has no legal representation in Brussels and is not registered in the EU's Transparency Register, which has helped the platform avoid EU directives to curb online misconduct, Liberation notes. The EU also failed to involve Telegram in joining the voluntary code of conduct against disinformation, signed by companies like Google, Meta, and TikTok. Dialogue between EU authorities and Telegram began only in February when the Digital Services Act (DSA) required the platform to comply with EU rules, including removing illegal content and cooperating with national governments on these matters. The EU is currently investigating whether Telegram is underreporting the number of average monthly active users within the union, writes the Financial Times. The platform’s management claims this number is 41 million, which is below the 45 million threshold set by the EU’s Digital Services Act for very large online platforms. Exceeding this threshold would automatically impose stricter requirements on Telegram from the EU.

In Russia, the saga of blocking Telegram lasted two years and ended with the authorities effectively abandoning their intent to ban the messenger. However, this event did not represent a victory of freedom over repression. Rather, Russian authorities learned how to utilise the platform and concluded that, for the time being, the benefits of such use outweigh the costs associated with the lack of control over the service.

Telegram is valuable to the Russian government not only because it allows for the promotion of alternative propaganda narratives on rapidly growing pro-government and military-patriotic channels (an increase in users, driven by this, also benefits the service's owner). Using phone number databases, security forces can determine the unique digital ID of any Russian user on the platform, thus de-anonymising them. ‘The ability to match an ID and phone number is a long-standing vulnerability in Telegram,’ writes investigative journalist Andrei Zakharov, ’which Durov has never fully addressed. This helps expand the user base (when a person instals Telegram, he immediately sees who among his contacts is already in the messenger).’ Therefore, the currently unresolved question of whether the platform cooperates with Russian authorities is thus not that important.

Durov's dilemma

At this stage of Telegram's development, the interests of the Russian authorities and the platform's owner do not conflict with each other. Direct cooperation (such as handing over the mythical ‘encryption keys’) is essentially unnecessary for either party.

The Russian digital environment is quite paradoxical. It combines excessive formal regulation and policing on one hand, with ‘wild West’, or rather ‘wild East’ practices, on the other. Strict censorship coexists with tolerance for the black market of illegally obtained information, which is sold or leaked into the public sphere on a massive scale, while extralegal strategies have become part of state policy under international sanctions. Both Russian security forces and Telegram benefit from this digital ‘grey area’, which explains why the Kremlin has shifted from being an enemy of the platform to its protector.

There is a fundamental contradiction in Telegram's development model. From a tool of resistance against Russian authoritarianism, as it initially appeared, it has transformed into a global player, using its uncensored nature to rapidly expand its user base. This rapid growth has attracted the attention of regulatory authorities worldwide. RKS Global analyst Sarkis Darbinyan emphasises that the current EU requirements for Telegram are actually minimal: most of them are the standard requirements that law enforcement and officials impose on any platform concerning illegal content. However, if Telegram continues to grow, it could fall under the stricter provisions of the European Digital Markets Act, which is more rigorous with such platforms.

Of course, Durov still has every opportunity to improve relations with the authorities of Western countries. This does not require handing over the ‘encryption keys’, but rather aligning the platform’s policies with European content moderation rules. This path leads to a higher market valuation for the platform and its potential IPO. However, it will be difficult to reconcile this with the benefits of ‘wild east’ strategies. As the statistics above show, Telegram's globalisation in recent years has primarily been driven by developing countries with their ‘two-layer’ legal systems; it is there, apparently, that the main potential for further audience growth lies.

Whether Durov can maintain his balance on three fronts – continuing to grow the platform's popularity according to the norms of unregulated Eastern markets, avoiding censorship demands from autocracies, and at the same time capitalising on his popularity under Western rules – is the main question today. The French legal proceedings will force Durov to provide an answer to this.