2024-08-26 00:25:01
The Russian citizen Pavel Dúrov, the creator together with his brother of the encrypted messaging network Telegram and arrested yesterday in France, has managed to anger both Russia and the West with his liberal attitude when he refused to cooperate with the authorities either to address political conflict or extremism. “Humanity needs a neutral site like Telegram, which respects privacy and human freedom (…) Actually, it doesn’t matter if Telegram is used by the opposition or the powerful group. The rules are the same for all groups. In in this way, we are not impartial,” assured Dúrov in an interview last February with the American journalist Tucker Carlson.
Telegram, which was officially launched in 2013, is approaching 1,000 million monthly users – 350,000 new customers sign up every day – which makes it an application with a global reach, according to Efe.
Internet Totem
“I want to be an Internet totem,” he told his teacher when he graduated from high school in St. His first step into the digital world was when he created a virtual library with the works of high school students so that they could be consulted by other students (Durov.com).
In 2006 he founded Vkontakte (VK), Russia’s Facebook, which quickly became the first social network in Russia, something that caught the attention of the Kremlin, which is headed by a man from the autocratic era – Vladimir Putin – which is even more suspicious . internet Under pressure, he ended up selling the platform in 2014 to friends of the Kremlin (mail.ru) .
When he was still the chairman of VK, he launched paper airplanes made of dollar bills from his office window, a gesture, because the paper airplane is the symbol of Telegram, whose encryption standard was created by his brother your Nikolai. “The idea of creating Telegram came (…) when armed police came to my house and tried to break it (…) Then it occurred to me that it would not be bad to create an application to the exchange. of messages with reliable encryption,” he told Carlson.
Related news
An instrument of resistance
Dúrov, who is 39 does not have a clear idea, according to experts and people close to him, has attacked political pressure, although also from other giants like Google or Apple. He prides himself both on his geopolitical independence – he considers Telegram a universal tool and refuses to connect to Russia – and on the fact that his app is used by the opposition from Hong Kong to Belarus. However, he was recently accused of blocking the Intelligente Vot platform of the opposition Aleksei Navalni.
#libertarians #angered #Russia #West