Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov lashed out at French authorities, saying his arrest last week over accusations of a lack of moderation on the messaging app was “misleading.”
In his first public statement since his detention, he rejected claims that Telegram was “some kind of anarchist paradise”, calling it “absolutely untrue.”
Mr. Durov was arrested at an airport north of Paris on August 25 and has since been charged with conspiracy to allow illegal trade, drug trafficking, fraud and the dissemination of child sexual abuse images on his website.
In a statement posted on Telegram, Durov said that holding him responsible for crimes committed by third parties on the platform was both “surprising” and “misleading.”
“If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the common practice is to initiate legal action against the service itself,” the Russian-born French billionaire said.
“It is misleading to use laws that predate the smartphone era to accuse a CEO of committing third-party crimes on the platform he manages.”
“Building technology is difficult enough on its own. Innovators will never build new tools if they know they could be personally responsible for the potential misuse of those tools,” he added.
While he admitted Telegram was not perfect, he said French authorities had multiple ways of contacting him and Telegram, and the app had an official representative in the EU.
“Claims by some media outlets that Telegram is some kind of anarchist haven are absolutely untrue. We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day,” he insisted.
Telegram allows groups of up to 200,000 members, which critics say makes it easier for misinformation to spread and for users to share conspiracist, neo-Nazi, pedophile or terror-related content.
Most recently in the UK, the app has come under scrutiny for hosting far-right channels that played a major role in violent riots in British cities last month.
Telegram does remove some groups, but cybersecurity experts say overall its systems for moderating extremist and illegal content are significantly weaker than those of other social media companies and messaging apps.
In a statement on Thursday, Durov acknowledged that the messaging app’s “sudden increase” in the number of users — which he estimated at 950 million — “has caused growing pains and made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. .
He said his goal was to “significantly improve the situation in this area”.
Last week, the BBC learned that Telegram had Refusal to participate in international projects Designed to detect and remove child abuse material online.
Pavel Durov, 39, was born in Russia and now lives in Dubai, where Telegram is headquartered. He holds United Arab Emirates and French citizenship.
Telegram, which he founded in 2013, is particularly popular in Russia, Ukraine and former Soviet countries.
The app was banned in Russia in 2018 due to his previous refusal to hand over user data. The ban was lifted in 2021.
Telegram is listed as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and WeChat.
