2024-09-06 17:45:37
During Pavel Durov’s arrest, there was a debate about the controversial content on Telegram. Now the IT manager himself is speaking out.
The founder of the messenger service Telegram, Pavel Durov, has spoken out for the first time since his days-long arrest in Paris in a long post and thanked his fans for their support. He also rejected the accusations of the French authorities that Telegram does not respond to requests from official bodies. In fact, he has already provided help himself.
“Telegram has an official representative in the EU who accepts and responds to requests from the EU,” Durow said on the social network. The 39-year-old is free on bail and is not allowed to leave France.
According to him, there was no reason to arrest him for allegedly not cooperating with the authorities because he is a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai, his adopted hometown of the United Arab Emirates. “When I was asked some time ago, I personally helped them set up a hotline with Telegram to counter the terrorist threat in France,” he said.
Investigators in Paris accuse Durow of failing to cooperate sufficiently with authorities in criminal investigations and legally permissible wiretapping measures. There is suspicion that Durow made himself complicit in drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud and several crimes related to child abuse by failing to intervene in Telegram and failing to cooperate with authorities.
Durow rejected allegations that Telegram was a paradise for anarchists. “We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish transparency reports every day,” Durow wrote. At the same time, he admitted that this was probably not enough and that Telegram, which has more than 950 million users, wanted to become much better at moderating content. Durow promised progress soon. The goal is to make the network industry as a whole stronger and safer.
In his post, Durow also criticized the idea of using laws from an era before smartphones to prosecute managers for crimes committed by third parties. This was a “misguided approach,” he said. “No innovator will ever develop new tools if he knows that he can be held personally responsible for any possible misuse of those tools.”
It is a difficult balancing act to operate globally on the one hand and to please every country on the other. The network is open to dialogue, but the principle is to protect users in authoritarian states. Sometimes there is no agreement between the need to protect privacy and the security interests of the authorities. “In these cases, we are prepared to leave the country. We have done that many times.” In the past, Telegram has also refused to hand over encryption codes to Russian and Iranian authorities for monitoring users.