Telegram founder Pavel Durov spoke out for the first time since he was arrested by French authorities at Bourget Airport outside Paris on Aug. 25.
Durov, the billionaire CEO of the popular messaging app, slammed the French government for targeting him personally in a Telegram post Thursday. The Telegram CEO criticized authorities for punishing him for the actions of others who abused his social media platform.
“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 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.”
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov just posted this statement in his Telegram channel. This is his first communication since his arrest in France last month. Worth reading. pic.twitter.com/XrZDTWx45b
— Gabor Gurbacs (@gaborgurbacs) September 5, 2024
French authorities alleged that Durov’s Telegram platform was used for criminal activities including child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, according to ABC News. Prosecutors charged Durov with complicity in managing an online platform to enable illegal transactions, complicity in crimes such as enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud; and failure to comply with law enforcement, Axios reported. (RELATED: Jonathan Turley Slams ‘Global Censors,’ Says Americans Should Be Afraid After Telegram Founder’s Arrest)
The Russian-born billionaire CEO wrote that he was surprised when he was told he may be “personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram.”
Durov said Telegram is “not some sort of anarchic paradise” and acknowledged that rapidly increasingly numbers of Telegram users “caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to use our platform,” ABC News reported. He revealed that Telegram is implementing internal improvements to fix this problem.
“That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon,” Durov wrote.
Durov expressed in his post that French authorities had many avenues of contacting him regarding concerns and stated that he previously worked with them to “establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.”
“If a country is unhappy with an Internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself,” Durov said.
Prior to Durov’s arrest, the Telegram founder told Tucker Carlson in April that the U.S. government attempted to hire one of his platform’s engineers without his knowledge to help them spy on Telegram’s users. The conservative group America First Legal (AFL) filed two Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests Thursday with the State Department over “reporting” from State Department official Mike Benz that the Biden-Harris administration may have been aware of the the arrest of Durov before it occurred.
Big tech censorship concerns are on the rise across the globe. Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes banned Twitter in Brazil and petitioned the federal government to block the social media accounts of everyday citizens for their political beliefs, according to screenshots of documents released Wednesday by Twitter.
Billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and rebranded the platform as X following its censorship of former President Donald Trump and conservative political content. Trump announced Thursday that he will appoint Musk to head a Government Efficiency Commission if he wins a second term come November.
