The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, under investigation in France, has said that French authorities should have approached his company with their complaints rather than detaining him, calling the arrest ‘“misguided”.
Durov, writing on his Telegram channel early on Friday in his first public comments since his detention last month, denied any suggestion the app was an “anarchic paradise”.
The Russian-born multi-billionaire said the investigation into the app was surprising in that French authorities had access to a “hot line” he had helped set up and they could have contacted Telegram’s EU representative at any time.
“If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself,” he wrote.
“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.”
Telegram, he said, was not perfect, but
“the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue,” he wrote. “We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day.”
Durov, now a French national, was detained late last month in France amid an investigation into crimes related to child sexual abuse images, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions associated with the app.
He has been charged by the French judiciary for allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app but avoided being detained in jail before the case is heard with a €5m bail. He was granted release on condition that he report to a police station twice a week and remain in France.
The charges against Durov include complicity in the spread of sexual images of children and a litany of other alleged violations on the messaging app.
His surprise arrest has put a spotlight on the criminal liability of Telegram, the popular app with about 1 billion users, and has sparked debate over free speech and government censorship.
Reuters contributed to this report
• This article was amended on 6 September 2024 to better reflect Pavel Durov’s comments about the app.
