Pavel Durov, the Russian-born CEO of the messaging app Telegram, commented for the first time since his arrest last month in Paris on charges of publishing extremist and illegal content, calling the arrest “surprising” and the charges “misguided.” He also announced changes to some Telegram features and promised to “improve” the company’s efforts to prevent criminals from abusing its platform.
By Robyn Dixon
and Durov, 39, was accused of failing to curb illegal content including child pornography on Telegram, ordered to pay 5 million euros ($5.6 million) bail and required to report to a police station twice a week. He is barred from leaving France.
French law enforcement officials said Telegram failed to comply with legal requests for information related to criminal activity on the app, including drug trafficking and illicit transactions.
Durov’s statement on Telegram began with an emoji heart and ended with an emoji thank you, expressing gratitude to “everyone for your support and love!”
He argued that a CEO should not be responsible for misuse of a platform and that if he were held responsible, no one would ever innovate. But he conceded that the platform needs to do more to prevent criminals from using it.
“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 wrote. “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.”
Durov’s arrest has ignited a debate on whether governments should have the power to compel online platforms to curb illegal activity, including terrorism and organized crime, including in private or encrypted forums, and raised questions about the chilling effect that such prosecutions may have on free speech.
The actions of French prosecutors may herald an era in which national authorities clamp down on illicit or harmful actions enabled by internet platforms. Last week, a Brazilian Supreme Court judge, Alexandre de Moraes, suspended social media platform X for defying a court order to appoint a legal representative in the country. It followed an earlier court order to suspend dozens of accounts for spreading disinformation.
In Telegram’s case, law enforcement officials complained that efforts to communicate were ignored.
Durov argued that Telegram, widely seen as a platform with low levels of content moderation, did remove harmful content.
“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.”
“However, we hear voices saying that it’s not enough,” he added, blaming Telegram’s “growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform.”
“That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard,” he wrote, promising to share details soon.
In a second post on Friday, Durov said Telegram has reached 10 million paid subscribers to its “premium” service, as well as announcing some new features and the removal of others. Among those features dropped is the ability for users to upload media to a standalone blogging tool called Telegraph, which he said “seems to have been misused by anonymous actors.”
“While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our almost billion users at risk,” Durov wrote. He added, “We are committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise.”
Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, said Durov has a point about the dangers of prosecutorial overreach.
“Europe has a long history of individually prosecuting internet company executives for third-party content,” he said. “These criminal risks are an important factor in why the European internet has not seen the kind of innovation that we’ve seen in the United States.”
Mary Anne Franks, a professor at George Washington University School of Law, countered that innovation should involve finding ways to mitigate technology’s harms, as in the case of air bags and tamper-proof medicine bottles.
“Developing products with no consideration for the harm they could cause isn’t innovative, it’s sociopathic,” Franks said.
Durov, who holds various passports including those of France and the United Arab Emirates, said he was interviewed by police for four days. “I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram,” he said.
“The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance,” he wrote, claiming they could simply have Googled “Telegram EU address for law enforcement.”
He argued that the “established practice” for governments with complaints over internet platforms was to take legal action against the service, not the CEO.
Durov said Telegram was ready to leave any country that abused users’ right to privacy, but he acknowledged a need to balance security against privacy.
“When Russia demanded we hand over ‘encryption keys’ to enable surveillance, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Russia.” (Russia’s effort to ban Telegram in 2018 was later abandoned, and the service is widely used there.)
Telegram, he continued, left Iran after authorities demanded the service block the accounts of people protesting the regime.
“Establishing the right balance between privacy and security is not easy,” Durov wrote. “You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with [European Union] laws.”
“But we’ve always been open to dialogue.”
He wrote that he had helped French authorities set up a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.
The Paris prosecutor’s office declined to comment beyond referring to previous statements on the case.
In complex criminal cases, French magistrates can charge defendants and place them under formal investigation. While that process indicates that authorities assess there may be enough evidence to continue with the case, it does not always lead to trial. Investigations can take years. Durov’s judicial supervision, including a ban on leaving French territory, could be open ended or last until the end of proceedings.
Ellen Francis in Brussels contributed to this report.
