Pavel Durov, Telegram’s CEO, has been detained in France amid allegations that the messaging service failed to combat criminality on its platform, particularly the spread of child sexual abuse material. The 39-year-old Russian-born businessman was apprehended on Saturday, August 25th, at Le Bourget airport north of Paris, according to Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau. He was then jailed for four days as part of an investigation into potential criminal behaviour on Telegram. On Wednesday, 28th August, he was indicted and barred from leaving the country, according to a statement made by the Paris Prosecutor. He was freed under court supervision, the statement added and must pay a €5 million ($5.5 million) bond and attend a police station in France twice a week.
Elon Musk urged France to “free Pavel” to avoid a threat to democracy, while Paul Graham, co-founder of top Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, claimed it would jeopardise the country’s prospects of becoming “a major startup hub.” However, while some claim that France is leading an attack on free speech and innovation, the truth is more complicated. Durov’s imprisonment is not a stunning act of government overreach, but rather the result of years of conflict between his weak attitude to control and mounting concerns about Telegram’s role in facilitating illegal activities. The allegations are comprehensive and serious, alleging Telegram’s involvement in the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), drug trafficking, and money laundering. While Meta Platforms Inc., TikTok, and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube have much stricter bans on such activities, Durov’s arrest should be interpreted as a sign that the “no consequences” era of social media is coming to an end as governments push to hold companies more accountable for what happens on their platforms.
Durov and his brother Nikolai, a programmer and mathematician, founded Telegram, which is now one of the world’s most popular messaging apps. Before developing Telegram, the Durov brothers gained their money in 2006 by inventing the social media network VKontakte. The network swiftly gained traction in Russia, and Pavel Durov now has a net worth of more than $9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. This victory made Durov a Kremlin target. In 2014, he departed the country and sold his VKontakte ownership. According to Telegram’s website, Durov lives in Dubai and is a citizen of both France and the United Arab Emirates. He hasn’t said if he has relinquished his Russian citizenship.
Telegram was founded in 2013 when Durov’s relationship with the Russian government deteriorated. The next year, authorities raided VK’s premises, and police accused Durov of colliding with and wounding a traffic officer in a white Mercedes, sending him into hiding. He finally left VK in April 2014, selling his stock in the firm for an unknown amount. This choice freed him up to work on Telegram, first in Russia and subsequently in the UAE, where he established the platform’s official headquarters.
After Durov’s incarceration, the Russian embassy in Paris stated that it “immediately asked the French authorities for an explanation of the reasons and demanded that they ensure the protection of his rights and provide consular access.” Russia has alleged, without providing evidence, that Durov’s detention is an effort by the US to exercise control over the platform through France. “Telegram is one of the few and at the same time the largest Internet platforms over which the United States has no influence,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, head of Russia’s State Duma, the lower chamber of parliament, in an app statement.
Pavel Durov, formerly known as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg, has long been an outlier among the world’s most powerful social media executives. Unlike Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, he has never been on Capitol Hill to apologise for prior errors. Unlike TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, he has never agreed to a five-hour hearing by Congress on whether his app is eavesdropping on Americans. And, unlike Elon Musk of X, he has never participated in embarrassing photo opportunities in which he claims that new regulations are “aligned with my thinking.” Instead, Durov has spent years promoting Telegram as a resolutely anti-authoritarian tool. In reality, this has meant disregarding orders from various countries to either remove information or provide the identity of Telegram users accused of major crimes. “To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments,” the corporation maintains on its website.
French authorities reported an “almost total lack of response from Telegram to legal requests,” according to Beccuau. “This is what led JUNALCO [the National Jurisdiction for the Fight against Organised Crime] to open an investigation into the possible criminal liability of this messaging service’s executives in the commission of these offences,” she elaborated. The preliminary inquiry began in February 2024, and the OFMIN, an institution established to combat violence against children, supervised the early enquiries, according to her statement. “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the abuse of that platform,” Telegram stated before Durov’s allegation. The platform with 900 million active users did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the claims.
However, it is far from “absurd” for a firm to be held responsible for illegal activities on its platform. Telegram is in this situation because it chose not to moderate material — not because a government is attempting to spy on its ostensibly private discussions. Cryptography experts have long noted that Telegram is not truly end-to-end encrypted. Most chats on the app employ client-server encryption, which means Telegram could read message contents if it wanted to (because much of the material on the platform is on public channels). The company’s “Secret Chats” function does provide end-to-end encryption, although it is not enabled by default and is not often utilised for normal conversation. In essence, Telegram has created the appearance of complete anonymity while maintaining the technological ability to monitor information, which it chooses not to utilise.
As Telegram has developed, its laissez-faire approach to moderation has enraged lawmakers across the world who are concerned about the information floating on public channels. Iran and Thailand both banned Telegram in 2018 and 2020, respectively, in response to anti-government rallies. Germany’s interior minister proposed banning the app in 2022 after anti-vaccine Telegram groups were discovered to be promoting violence against local officials. The same year, Brazil momentarily banned Telegram after it refused to comply with a legal ruling. Spain also stopped the app in 2024 after Telegram failed to reply to a judge’s request for further information regarding copyrighted content. That prohibition, however, was removed after just three days.
France’s action against Durov represents a reckoning for that decision, and the involvement of specialised organisations such as the country’s Centre for the Fight against Cybercrime (C3N) and the Anti-Fraud National Office (ONAF) emphasises the seriousness of his app’s alleged violations. Musk and other opponents may claim that his arrest jeopardises free speech, but Telegram’s hands-off attitude to most of the activities on its platform does not exempt it from accountability. The digital world demands as much supervision as the physical one, and turning a blind eye to a platform that becomes a vehicle for widespread illegal conduct is a dereliction of responsibility rather than a defence of liberty.
Bastien Le Querrec, legal officer for the French internet freedom organisation La Quadrature du Net, does not support Telegram’s lack of moderation. However, he is concerned that the prosecution against Durov represents the enormous pressure that social media and messaging applications are currently under to work with law enforcement. “[The prosecutor] refers to a provision in French law that requires platforms to disclose any useful document that could allow law enforcement to do interception of communication,” according to him. “To our knowledge, this is the first time a platform, regardless of size, has been prosecuted [in France] for refusing to disclose such documents.” It sets a very troubling precedent.”
This week’s developments have taught the internet sector that social media titans can no longer operate in a regulatory vacuum. Europe is on pace to adopt a harder stance on social media problems, with regulations such as the Digital Services Act and Britain’s Online Safety Act set to go into effect within the next year or two. The allegations brought by French prosecutors are unrelated to the new EU regulation, but they reflect a larger change in hostility. The IT industry’s top players aren’t as invincible as they assumed.
