Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has hit out at French authorities, calling his arrest last week in relation to allegations of insufficient moderation on the messaging app “misguided”.
In his first public statement since he was detained, he denied claims that Telegram is “some sort of anarchic paradise” as “absolutely untrue”.
Mr Durov was arrested on 25 August at an airport north of Paris and has since been charged over suspected complicity in allowing illicit transactions, drug trafficking, fraud and the spread of child sex abuse images to flourish on his site.
In Mr Durov’s statement, which he published on Telegram, he said holding him responsible for crimes committed by third parties on the platform was both a “surprising” and “misguided approach”.
“If a country is unhappy with an Internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself,” the Russian-born billionaire, who is also a French national, said.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.”
“Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools,” he added.
While he conceded that Telegram was not perfect, he said French authorities had several ways to get in touch with him and with Telegram, and that the app has an official representative in the EU.
“The claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day,” he insisted.
Telegram allows groups of up to 200,000 members, which critics have argued makes it easier for misinformation to spread, and for users to share conspiracist, neo-Nazi, paedophilic, or terror-related content.
Recently in the UK, the app has been scrutinised for hosting far-right channels that were instrumental in organising violent disorder in English cities last month.
Telegram did remove some groups, however cybersecurity experts say overall its system of moderating extremist and illegal content is significantly weaker than that of other social media companies and messenger apps.
In his statement on Thursday, Mr Durov admitted that an “abrupt increase” in the number of users on the messaging app – which he put at 950 million – had “caused growing pains 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 has refused to join international programmes aimed at detecting and removing child abuse material online.
Pavel Durov, 39, was born in Russia and now lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based. He holds citizenship of the United Arab Emirates and France.
Telegram, which he founded in 2013, is particularly popular in Russia, Ukraine and former Soviet Union states.
The app was banned in Russia in 2018, after a previous refusal by him to hand over user data. The ban was reversed in 2021.
Telegram is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.