Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times/Redux
On Saturday night, French police arrested Pavel Durov, the CEO of the encrypted chat program Telegram, which has more than 900 million users worldwide. He has been charged after refusing to hire content moderators to police the app for its use in criminal enterprises, including the dissemination of child sexual-abuse material, money laundering, and selling drugs, according to French law enforcement. His arrest has set off a global debate about free speech, particularly on the right, which claims Durov is being used as a scapegoat by countries that want to abuse their surveillance powers. “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for abuse of that platform,” a Telegram spokesman said. French president Emmanuel Macron has sought to distance himself from the arrest, saying it was made by prosecutors with “complete independence” and that “this is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to decide.”
For almost two decades, Durov, 39, has been called the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia,” a comparison that the normally press-averse tech founder has seemed uncomfortable with. He spent his childhood growing up in both Russia and Turin, Italy, where his father moved the family for his work as a scholar in Roman literature. Coming back to St. Petersburg, the Durovs brought with them an IBM computer, on which Pavel and his older brother learned to build programs. According to an early profile on him in Bloomberg Businessweek, he was a prodigious coder who created a social-media network for St. Petersburg State University. “He always likes to be the architect who controls the whole system,” Nikolai Kononov told Businessweek. “He’s an individualist, an egoist — he works only for himself, plays only his game.”
He first came to global prominence as a prodigious coder in 2006 when the 21-year-old founded VKontakte, Russia’s answer to Facebook. It was a hit there, as well as many of the other former Soviet countries, and would be the source of his early wealth. For years, Bloomberg reported, Vladimir Putin’s regime left the site alone as it focused on controlling broadcast and other traditional forms of media. Durov would later defy the state when it tried to shut down anti-Putin protest groups, which he refused to do. “It was about us defending freedom of speech and freedom of assembly,” he would later tell Tucker Carlson. In 2013, he said, the Russian government ordered him to either hand over information on protesters in Ukraine opposing Russia’s stooge in Kyiv or sell his stake in the platform and flee the country. The next year, he left.
By that time, Durov had already started Telegram with his brother, Nikolai, a mathematician. Its original offices were based in Berlin but later moved to Dubai.
Like many other chat apps, Telegram allows people to message one another and create large groups to communicate. In part because of Durov’s history of defying governments, it has flourished as an app for not only everyday online communities but also criminals. (This has not always been the case: In 2022, Telegram deleted 60 channels associated with far-right nationalist groups at the request of the German government.) The company has also been blocked in countries such as Brazil, China, and Iran. In his interview with Carlson, Durov claimed that the FBI tried to convince Telegram engineers to allow some kind of backdoor access into the app.
Telegram has been under investigation by OFMIN, a French law-enforcement agency that started in November to protect minors. In a LinkedIn post, Jean-Michel Bernigaud, the agency’s chief, wrote that “the heart of this issue is the lack of moderation and cooperation of the platform (which has nearly 1 billion users), particularly in the fight against paedophilia.” He then linked an investigative report by ARTE, a French-German broadcaster, about how predators take advantage of Facebook and Instagram to target children.
It is unclear if Durov will be charged and with what. Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in a press release that Durov’s arrest was part of a broader probe looking into complicity by an online platform on several alleged crimes — including disseminating CSAM, selling drugs, and hosting organized gang activity — as well as money laundering and failing to provide information to government authorities.
Durov had apparently known that he was a wanted man in France and was aware of investigators’ attempts to hold him accountable — making his flight to Paris something of a surprise, an unnamed investigator told German outlet Deutsche Welle. “Enough of Telegram’s impunity,” the person said.
Outside France, Durov’s arrest has been cast as a blow to freedom of speech. “Pavel Durov is in a French prison tonight, it is a warning to all platforms that refuse to censor the truth at the request of governments,” Carlson wrote on X. Elon Musk has also called for Durov to be freed. Russian politicians have painted the arrest as political, despite the country’s rocky history with Durov. “He miscalculated,” said Dmitry Medvedev, the country’s former president and the current deputy head of the Russian Security Council. “For all our common enemies now, he is Russian — and therefore unpredictable and dangerous.”
Unlike iMessage or Signal, Telegram does not automatically use end-to-end encryption, a privacy measure that shields a company from accessing its own users’ messages. (An option is available for users to enable this.) This means that, if it wanted to, Telegram could hand over messages that aren’t private to government authorities. This has made it a target for governments that are looking to get information for investigations.
French prosecutors have not cited a law that Durov and Telegram are alleged to have broken. However, there is a broader regulatory law that enables investigators to hold Telegram accountable for what appears on its networks. France abides by the European Union’s Digital Services Act, a 2022 law that requires social-media companies to police the content on their platforms and to hand over any data on alleged criminal activities. Unlike in the U.S. — where social-media companies are shielded from such liability by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — companies in Europe can be held accountable for the content that appears on their platforms and breaks their own rules.
Not really, but there are some close parallels, particularly for the money-laundering charges. In 2022, authorities in the Netherlands, which is an E.U. member state, arrested Alexey Pertsev, another Russian national, for programming Tornado Cash, a program that anonymizes crypto transactions. Tornado Cash had allegedly been used by North Korea to launder stolen cryptocurrency, and he was held responsible for that, despite not being involved in the actual transactions. Earlier this year, he was sentenced to five years in prison for aiding $1.2 billion in money laundering.
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