The Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov, founder of the messaging app Telegram, was arrested on Saturday at Le Bourget Airport near Paris. His detention sparked considerable attention, highlighting ongoing concerns over the platform’s content moderation policies and drawing condemnation from other platform heads, like Elon Musk. Edward Snowden called it “an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association.”
Durov, known as “Russia’s Zuckerberg” and worth an estimated $15 billion, has been charged with a whole lot of illegal activities on Telegram, including drug trafficking, terrorism promotion, fraud, and child exploitation.
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A staunch “free speech” advocate, Durov is also the founder of Russia’s biggest social networking site, VKontakte. In 2014, he said that the Russian government had demanded he shut down opposition communities there, so he sold his share in the company and left the country over it. According to Telegram, he now holds dual citizenship in France and the UAE. He was arrested when he landed in France on a flight from Azerbaijan. (It’s unknown whether he is still a Russian citizen.)
France’s President Emmanuel Macron said in a post on X, “The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation. It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”
The French prosecutor’s office is looking into whether Telegram’s, uh, let’s say, lenient content moderation allowed Telegram to become home to every illegal activity under the sun. A statement from the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office listed 12 criminal counts, which span from pornography and organized fraud to offering encryption services without officially declaring and registering them with the government.
These are the full charges:
- Complicity – web-mastering an online platform in order to enable an illegal transaction in organized group
- Refusal to communicate, at the request of competent authorities, information or documents necessary for carrying out and operating interceptions allowed by law
- Complicity – possessing pornographic images of minors
- Complicity – distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in organized group
- Complicity – acquiring, transporting, possessing, offering or selling narcotic substances
- Complicity – offering, selling or making available, without legitimate reason, equipment, tools, programs or data designed for or adapted to get access to and to damage the operation of an automated data processing system
- Complicity – organized fraud
- Criminal association with a view to committing a crime or an offense punishable by 5 or more years of imprisonment
- Laundering of the proceeds derived from organized group’s offences and crimes
- Providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration
- Providing a cryptology tool not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration
- Importing a cryptology tool ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.