Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has criticized French authorities, calling his arrest last week over alleged insufficient censorship on the messaging app a “mistake.”
In his first public statement since his detention, he dismissed claims that Telegram was “some kind of anarchist paradise” as “completely false”.
Mr Durov was arrested on 25 August at an airport north of Paris and has since been charged on suspicion of facilitating illegal transactions, drug trafficking, fraud and distributing child sexual abuse images on his website.
In a statement posted on Telegram, Mr. Durov said holding him responsible for crimes committed by third parties on the platform was a “surprising” and “wrong” approach.
“If a country is not satisfied with a certain Internet service, it is common practice to sue that service,” said the Russian billionaire, who is also a French citizen.
“Using pre-smartphone era law to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is the wrong approach.”
“Building technology is hard. No innovator would build new tools if they knew they could be personally liable for the potential misuse of those tools,” he added.
While admitting Telegram is not perfect, he said French authorities have multiple ways to contact him and Telegram, and the app has official representation in the EU.
“Claims in some media that Telegram is some kind of chaos haven are completely false. We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day,” he stressed.
Telegram allows groups of up to 200,000 members, which critics say makes it easier for misinformation to spread and allows users to share content related to conspiracy theories, neo-Nazis, pedophiles or terrorists.
The app has come under scrutiny in the UK recently for hosting far-right channels that played a key role in organizing violent riots in British cities last month.
Telegram has removed some groups, but cybersecurity experts say the company’s overall system for moderating extremist and illegal content is significantly weaker than that of other social media companies and messaging apps.
In a statement on Thursday, Mr Durov acknowledged that the “dramatic increase” in the number of users of the messaging app – which he put at 950 million – had “created difficulties that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform”.
He said he would aim to “significantly improve things in this regard”.
It comes after the BBC learned last week that Telegram had been refuse to participate in international programs aimed at detecting and removing child abuse material online.
Pavel Durov, 39, was born in Russia and currently lives in Dubai, where Telegram is headquartered. He holds citizenship from the United Arab Emirates and France.
Telegram, the app he founded in 2013, is particularly popular in Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet states.
The app was banned in Russia in 2018 after it refused to provide user data. The ban was overturned in 2021.
Telegram ranks as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.
