Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov has been arrested by French police at an airport north of Paris.
Mr Durov was detained after his private jet had landed at Le Bourget Airport, French media reported.
According to officials the 39-year-old billionaire was arrested under a warrant for offences related to the popular messaging app. The investigation is reportedly about a lack of moderation, with Mr Durov accused of failing to take steps to curb criminal uses of Telegram.
The app is accused of failure to cooperate with law enforcement over drug trafficking, child sexual content and fraud. Telegram has previously denied having insufficient moderation.
Pavel Durov was born in Russia and now lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based. He holds dual citizenship of the United Arab Emirates and France.
Telegram 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.
Mr Durov founded Telegram in 2013. He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.
On Sunday, the Russian Embassy in France wrote on Facebook that it was seeking to "clarify the reasons for the detention and to provide for the protection of Mr Durov’s rights and facilitate consular access".
The post added that French authorities had not been cooperating with Russian officials.
Russian Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova posted on Telegram asking whether Western human rights NGOs would be silent on Mr Durov's arrest, after they criticised Russia’s decision to “create obstacles” to the work of Telegram in Russia in 2018.
Several Russian officials condemned the businessman's arrest, saying it showed the West has double standards when it comes to free speech and democracy.
American whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has been living in exile in Russia since 2013, said on X that Mr Durov's arrest "was an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association".
X owner Elon Musk, who has faced extensive criticism over moderation and material hosted by his own social media site, posted repeatedly about the situation.
He hashtagged one post #freepavel, and in another wrote: "POV [Point of view]: It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme."
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.
In the UK, the app was scrutinised for hosting far-right channels that were instrumental in organising the violent disorder in English cities earlier this month.
Telegram did remove some groups, but overall its system of moderating extremist and illegal content is significantly weaker than that of other social media companies and messenger apps, say cybersecurity experts.
The chief executive of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has announced the messaging app will improve moderation on the platform and has removed some features that have been used for illegal activity.
The app’s founder unveiled the changes on Friday hours after calling his arrest by the French authorities last month “misguided”. Durov has since been charged with allegedly allowing criminal activity on the app.
In a post on X, he said the messaging app was “committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise”.
The changes announced by Durov included removing the app’s “people nearby” feature, which he said had “issues with bots and scammers”, and replacing it with “businesses nearby”, featuring legitimate businesses; and disabling media uploads on the app’s blogging tool, Telegraph, which Durov said was being “misused by anonymous actors”.
The Verge, a tech news site, also reported that Telegram has removed references on its FAQ page to private chats being protected and that requests to moderate them would not be processed. A spokesperson told the site that the app’s source code had not changed but users could report a new chat to moderators.
Durov added that Telegram’s nearly 1 billion users had been let down by a minority.
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“While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our almost billion users at risk,” he said.
EU joins Telegram investigation over user numbers. Potential sanctions could force significant changes. Durov's arrest adds to company's woes.
The Telegram instant messaging application is under attack from all directions. After the arrest of the company's CEO and founder, Pavel Durov, in France on suspicion of complicity in drug trafficking, fraud and pedophilia through the platform he owns, now the European Union is also joining the investigation. The suspicion: Telegram provided false data on the number of its active users on the continent.
Telegram stated in February that it has 41 million users in the European Union. Under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), Telegram was supposed to provide an updated number this month, but failed to do so, stating only that it has "far fewer than 45 million monthly active users on average in the EU."
Failure to provide the new data is a breach of the DSA, according to two EU officials. They added that the EU investigation is likely to find that the true number is higher than the threshold for "very large online platforms". Such a definition imposes greater obligations on the platform in terms of compliance and content management, external auditing and mandatory data sharing with the European Commission.
The European Commission's Joint Research Center — the European Union's Internal Data and Science Service — is currently conducting a technical investigation to determine the number of Telegram users in the EU, alongside ongoing talks with the app about its own calculations.
"We have a way through our systems and calculations to determine how accurate user data is," a European Commission spokesman told the Financial Times. "And if we think they haven't provided accurate user data, we can unilaterally define them [as a very large platform] based on our investigation."
As mentioned, Telegram's problems are not limited to the European front. Last week, CEO Pavel Durov was charged with aiding pedophilia, drug trafficking, money laundering for criminal organizations and distributing illegal content through the app he founded. He was also accused of refusing to cooperate with law enforcement in investigating crimes committed through Telegram.
Telegram's troubles pile up: EU opens new investigation - The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com
EU joins Telegram investigation over user numbers. Potential sanctions could force significant changes. Durov's arrest adds to company's woes.
It's one of the most serious accusations facing Pavel Durov: Among the many charges for which the Telegram CEO has been placed under formal investigation in France on August 28 is "complicity in organized group distribution of images of minors of a child pornographic nature." Durov is suspected of having knowingly allowed groups dedicated to child pornography content to flourish on his platform, and of having refused to respond to requisitions from the French judiciary in pedophilia cases. According to Politico, which cites documents from the French proceedings, it was a request to identify a suspected child pornographer that went unanswered that prompted the investigation − since widely extended to other potential crimes − that led to Durov's arrest.
When it comes to combating child pornography, Telegram is a special case. Despite its 900 million claimed users, it is the only major digital company that does not collaborate with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an American NGO that centralizes the world's largest database of such content. This organization works in partnership with law enforcement agencies to track down victims. It also co-manages a system that facilitates the automatic detection of child pornography content so that social media platforms can block its distribution.
Yet Telegram doesn't share any information with NCMEC: The company doesn't pass on any reports to the organization and doesn't respond to its requests for information.
"Telegram is truly in a league of their own as far as their lack of content moderation or even interest in preventing child sexual exploitation activity on their platform," said John Shehan, vice president of the NGO's Exploited Children Division & International Engagement, in an interview with NBC News. Shehan believes that Durov's arrest sends a positive signal.
Telegram's rules prohibit child pornography content, and the company asserts that it "actively moderates harmful content, on its platform, including child abuse content." In Germany, Telegram's failure to cooperate with the police and judicial authorities led to a major standoff between the company and the interior ministry in 2022, which threatened to ban the messaging service in the country.
Popular tool for illegal content
At the time, as revealed by the weekly magazine Spiegel, Telegram ended up passing information on suspected child criminals to German investigators after a discussion between senior German officials and Durov himself. While, as Spiegel explains, Telegram has not since passed on any user information to the German authorities, it has nonetheless complied with some of their requests, notably concerning the deletion of illegal groups.
Telegram founder and chief executive Pavel Durov said Monday that the messaging platform had removed more “problematic content” and would take a more proactive approach to complying with government requests. The announcement comes weeks after his arrest in France on charges of failing to act against criminals using the app.
Telegram’s search feature “has been abused by people who violated our terms of service to sell illegal goods”, Durov told the 13 million subscribers of his personal messaging channel.
“Over the past few weeks” staff had combed through Telegram using artificial intelligence to ensure “all the problematic content we identified in Search is no longer accessible”, he said.
Durov added that the platform had updated its terms of service and privacy policy to make clear that it would share infringers’ details with authorities – including internet IP addresses and phone numbers – “in response to valid legal requests”.
