Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Arrested At French Airport – Report

The reported arrest of Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire founder and owner of the Telegram messaging app, has once again ignited the free speech vs content moderation debate.

Reuters, citing three sources, reported that 39-year-old Durov was arrested at Le Bourget airport outside Paris shortly after he landed on a private jet late on Saturday and was placed in custody.

The arrest of Pavel Durov prompted the owner of another ‘free speech’ social media platform, Elon Musk to repeatedly post tweets critical of the French move, claiming that free speech in Europe was under attack.

Pavel Durov arrest

Reuters reported that there was no official confirmation from France of Durov’s arrest, but two French police sources and one Russian source told the news outlet that Durov was arrested shortly after arriving at Le Bourget airport on a private jet from Azerbaijan.

One of the two French police sources said that ahead of the jet’s arrival, police had spotted he was on the passenger list and moved to arrest him because he was the subject of an arrest warrant in France.

“Telegram abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act – its moderation is within industry standards and constantly improving,” Telegram said in a statement on the arrest.

“Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe,” it said. “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”

Durov lives in Dubai, and has dual French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was arrested as part of a preliminary police investigation into allegedly allowing a wide range of crimes due to a lack of moderators on Telegram and a lack of co-operation with police, a third French police source told Reuters.

A cybersecurity gendarmerie unit and France’s national anti-fraud police unit are leading the investigation, that source said, adding that the investigative judge was specialised in organised crime.

Ironic move?

The arrest of Pavel Durov in France for allegedly not co-operating with police and failing to implement content moderation, is ironic to some, considering he had fled Russia after he refused to implement Moscow’s censorship requests.

Dubai-based Telegram is widely used in countries across the former Soviet Union and Middle East, and is said to be the most popular instant messaging application in parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Telegram was founded in 2013 by Nikolai and Pavel Durov and has been growing steadily since then. It is said to have close to 1 billion users.

Pavel Durov fully owns Telegram and he is estimated by Forbes to have a fortune of $15.5 billion.

Pavel Durov had left Russia in 2014 after he refused to comply with demands to shut down opposition communities on his VK social media platform, which he sold.

Russian authorities had previously accused Telegram of enabling terrorists to communicate in secret through the encrypted messaging and had blamed the app for concealing the messages of the suicide bomber who killed 15 people in St Petersburg in April 2017.

The app was also used by Islamic State for propaganda purposes in the past, especially by those based in Russia, but the company made efforts to clamp down on these terrorist accounts.

However Telegram has consistently refused to comply with demands Russia’s FSB Federal Security Service which wanted access to some messages for its work, including safeguarding against terrorist attacks, citing respect for user privacy.

Indeed, Durov has always been vocal against the sharing of confidential data with government entities.

Durov has also dismissed questions about claims that Telegram was controlled by Russia as a false rumour spread by his competitors worried about Telegram’s growth.

“I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone,” Durov reportedly said about his exit from Russia.

Russia began blocking Telegram in 2018 after the app refused to comply with a court order granting state security services access to its users’ encrypted messages.