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Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov spoke for the first time since he was detained and charged by French authorities in late August for failing to address criminal content on the platform.
In a lengthy post on the site on Thursday, Durov said he was surprised by the decision to go after him rather than bring a lawsuit against the company itself, which faces a number of preliminary accusations of lax content moderation policies.If French authorities need help, “there are many ways to get in touch with me,” he said.
Durov promised to ensure the platform “significantly improves” its response to criminals using its service, and blamed the “exponential increase in users” to 950 million on “growing pains.”
But it added that the company was “ready to withdraw from markets that do not comply with our principles” and criticised the French authorities’ “misguided approach”.
Durov was detained at Paris-Le Bourget airport upon arriving in France on a private jet from Azerbaijan on August 24 and was subjected to four days of police interrogation. He is the subject of a formal investigation by a French judge and has been asked to remain on French territory.
Durov, a dual French and United Arab Emirates citizen, has pitched Telegram as an online safe haven insulated from government surveillance, but the company’s hands-off approach to content moderation has led French prosecutors to accuse him of facilitating money laundering, drug trafficking and the distribution of child sexual abuse material.
In his post, Durov questioned the decision to hold Telegram users personally liable, saying that “if a state is dissatisfied with an Internet service, it is customary to file lawsuits against the service itself.”
“It is a flawed approach to use a pre-smartphone law to sue a CEO for crimes committed by third parties on a platform he controls,” he said, claiming to be a “regular customer” of the French consulate in Dubai, where the company is headquartered.
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Durov said he had previously responded to French authorities who wanted to set up a hotline with Telegram to deal with terrorist threats. “The claims made by some media outlets that Telegram is some kind of anarchist haven are completely false. We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day,” he added.
Durov’s case has sparked a wider debate about the limits of freedom of speech on online platforms, with Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X, slamming French authorities over the move.
