Founder and CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov delivers a keynote speech during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain February 23, 2016.Albert Gea/Reuters
When Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov founded Telegram more than a decade ago, his aim was to create a messaging app that was free from censorship and government surveillance. The company would turn over user data to governments and law enforcement in only the rarest of circumstances, according to its terms of service.
That approach may have led to Mr. Durov’s arrest last weekend in France, where he is charged with being complicit in illegal activity occurring on the platform.
The charges against a high-profile tech CEO mark an escalation in the struggle between law enforcement and industry over harmful and illegal content, and the extent to which executives are responsible for the material shared on their services. Mr. Durov is not the only technology executive facing such allegations in France, which has taken an aggressive approach to the issue.
Canadian Paul Krusky is in custody in France and accused of facilitating organized crime through EncroChat, an encrypted phone company he operated. France also indicted 30 other individuals this month for their involvement with another encrypted messaging service called Sky ECC, which was founded by Vancouver-based Sky Global and became popular with drug dealers, according to Agence-France Presse.
“It is probably no coincidence that Pavel Durov’s arrest is taking place in a country where legal proceedings are already under way against two other companies offering encryption technologies,” said Guillaume Martine, a lawyer in France. “The arrest of Pavel Durov confirms that there is clearly a desire on the part of the French judicial system to attack encryption technologies and their use head-on.”
Both Mr. Durov and Mr. Krusky face similar accusations of applying unauthorized cryptographic devices or services. (In France, companies that wish to supply such services or devices are required to first file a declaration or to request authorization.) Both men are facing a slew of other allegations, including complicity in drug trafficking and money laundering.
However, there are also significant differences between the cases. Unlike apps such as Signal and WhatsApp, where conversations between users are end-to-end encrypted by default, Telegram users have to turn on the encryption feature, which isn’t available for group chats.
While Telegram is free and available for anyone to use, EncroChat required a specialized device and a subscription service. Mr. Krusky is accused by French authorities of having deliberately promoted and sold that service to known criminals, an allegation which he fully denies, according to his lawyer, Antoine Vey.
What is Telegram and why was its CEO Pavel Durov arrested in Paris?
The case against Mr. Durov, in contrast, is “almost certainly” more about Telegram’s failure to co-operate with content moderation requests on the non-encrypted parts of the platform, said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco.
Ms. Galperin noted that, in a recent interview with right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson, Mr. Durov said he is the only product manager at Telegram, and that he employs only about 30 engineers.
“Doing effective content moderation for a large platform actually requires enormous, well-trained teams of professionals, which Telegram has clearly chosen not to employ,” Ms. Galperin said.
Mr. Durov was charged on Wednesday for complicity in the spread of sexual images of children and for other crimes allegedly committed on Telegram.
He was granted bail on the condition that he pay €5-million and report to a police station twice a week, according to Reuters. He is also barred from leaving France.
Since Mr. Durov’s arrest last Saturday, some have praised him as a free-speech martyr. “#FreePavel,” Elon Musk wrote on X, the social platform he owns. U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden wrote that the arrest is “an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association,” while Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that the arrest “looks very bad and worrying for the future of software and comms freedom in Europe.”
Mr. Durov’s Instagram account, meanwhile, which is replete with shirtless photos of the fit 39-year-old, is filled with comments of support from users.
James Donaldson, chief executive of Toronto-based information security company Copperhead, is among those who see Mr. Durov’s arrest as an attack on free speech.
“Free speech and privacy are all but eroding as time goes on,” Mr. Donaldson said via an online messaging app. “Hopefully this event will spark a larger conversation about who should be blamed for content posted by users on an app.”
France has said Mr. Durov was apprehended as part of an investigation into the distribution of child sexual-abuse material (CSAM) and drugs on Telegram, as well as complicity in organized fraud. Telegram has also allegedly refused to turn over information to aid authorities in the investigation.
“[His arrest] is not a direct threat to freedom of expression,” said Sofie Royer, a research expert at the Centre for IT and IP Law at KU Leuven university in Belgium, given that the accusations relate to alleged criminal activity on the platform.
Telegram said in a statement on X that it abides by European laws, including the Digital Services Act, and that “its moderation is within industry standards and constantly improving.”
“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” the company said.
A participant of a one-person picket demonstrates a placard to bring attention to the arrest of Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, near the French embassy in Moscow, on Aug. 25. A slogan on the placard reads: 'Freedom for Pavel Durov.'Yulia Morozova/Reuters
Internet researchers have raised alarm about illegal activity on Telegram for some time. A report last year from the Stanford Internet Observatory found that the platform “implicitly” allows for the trading of CSAM in direct messages and private groups. Some of these groups appeared to have hundreds of thousands of users and were managed by sellers of CSAM. Such content was also found in public channels, according to the report, which said that Telegram was “failing to perform even basic content enforcement.”
Preston Byrne, managing partner of technology law firm Byrne & Storm, P.C., writes that the “laundry list” of charges against Mr. Durov mostly “relate to the French crime of complicité, which roughly equates to American aider/abettor liability” – essentially, knowingly facilitating or assisting with a crime.
In the United States, however, aiding and abetting requires “a specific intent to bring about the criminal result,” according to Mr. Byrne: “U.S. social-media companies simply failing to police their users doesn’t rise to this level, which is why U.S. social-media company CEOs don’t, as a general rule, get arrested for the crimes of their users by the American government.”
If French authorities are charging Mr. Durov on the basis of failing to police Telegram users or respond quickly to French document requests, as appears to be the case, “then this represents a dramatic escalation in the online censorship wars,” according to Mr. Byrne, who adds: “American tech entrepreneurs who run their services in accordance with American values – free speech and privacy through strong encryption, in particular – should not visit Europe, should not hire in Europe and should not host infrastructure in Europe until this situation is resolved.”
However, Ms. Galperin notes that France is far from the only country that has taken action against Telegram. Last year, Brazil temporarily suspended the app after it failed to provide information on neo-Nazi chat groups. And in 2022, Germany considered banning Telegram after the government found dozens of channels, including antisemitic conspiracy channels, that potentially violated German laws against hate speech.
“I am not sure that I would characterize France as being a place that is having more of these cases,” Ms. Galperin said. “I can name several cases in the U.S., I can talk about Brazil trying to bully platforms into better behaviour over a period of years. All governments try this.”