Telegram CEO Pavel Durov hits back at French charges
Summary
- The tech entrepreneur denied the platform refused to cooperate with European authorities to counter illegal content and said it removes millions of posts every day.
PARIS—Telegram founder and Chief Executive Pavel Durov denied that the messaging app refused to cooperate with European authorities to counter illegal content and said it removes millions of posts every day, his first public comments since French authorities arrested and charged him with complicity in spreading illicit content on the platform.
In a post on the app, Durov acknowledged that Telegram’s sharp increase in users—now around 950 million—has made it easier for criminals to abuse the platform.
“But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day," Durov wrote.
Durov, 39, was charged last week with a host of crimes, including complicity in the diffusion of child pornography, drug trafficking and the sale of unauthorized hacking software. French judges forbade him from leaving France; required him to post a €5 million bail, around $5.6 million; and ordered him to check in at a police station twice a week.
French prosecutors also charged him with refusing to cooperate with authorities, citing “an almost complete absence of response from Telegram to judicial demands."
Durov has been wooed and targeted by governments since launching Telegram in 2013. His phone was hacked by French and Emirati authorities in 2017, people familiar with the matter said. A year later, he was having lunch with President Emmanuel Macron, who invited him to move his company to France and discussed a request from him to become a French citizen.
Since leaving Russia in 2014 under pressure from the Kremlin, Durov has become a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis, and in 2021, France and the United Arab Emirates.
In his post, Durov said he frequently met with French officials at the embassy in Dubai, where Telegram is headquartered, and set up a hotline at the company to address terrorism threats in France.
Durov said authorities might be confused about where to send requests for cooperation and that the app should make that clearer. He suggested googling “Telegram EU address for law enforcement."
Durov’s arrest by French authorities escalated the struggle between tech companies and governments over the extent of their responsibility for illegal content that circulates on their platforms. The move sent shudders through the rest of the industry, with executives questioning the extent of their personal liability the next time they set foot in the European Union.
The 27-nation bloc has passed new laws, among the strictest in the world, that potentially hold online platforms responsible for illicit content and require them to have procedures in place to counter it.
“Sometimes we can’t agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. In those cases, we are ready to leave that country," Durov wrote. “We’ve done it many times."
Write to Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@wsj.com
