The issue of freedom of expression may have found a new symbol. Russian-born tech tycoon Pavel Durovwho was arrested in Paris on August 24. Mr Durov, 39, is the founder of Telegram, a cloud-based social media and instant messaging service that has 950 million active users, making it larger than X (540 million users).
French authorities had issued the warrants against Mr Durov and his brother Nikolai as part of a preliminary investigation into allegations that Telegram promoted crime through its ‘hands-off’ approach to controlling content. Mr Durov, as owner of Telegram, has been accused of complicity in a number of crimes, including drug trafficking, fraud, money laundering, organised crime, terrorism, cyberbullying, dissemination of child pornographic material and refusal to cooperate with law enforcement. Although he has been granted bail on a €5 million bond, he is barred from leaving France and must sign on with police twice a week.
Telegram said in a statement that it is “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the misuse of that platform”. It’s a sentiment that goes to the core of the growing conflict between tech platform owners and government regulators who want on-demand access to user information. The tech giants, most of whom are liberal in their politics, see these demands as an infringement on user privacy and free speech.
Mr Durov, who describes Telegram as a “privacy-focused social media platform”, said in 2015 that “privacy is, ultimately, more important than our fear of bad things happening” – a comment that made him popular among free speech campaigners.
Editorial | Reasonable sanctions: on the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and content hosting
Understandably, his arrest has sparked a fierce debate over the fine line between free speech rights and law enforcement. Edward Snowden, the famous whistleblower, had no doubts about this, posting on X, “The arrest of @Durov is an assault on basic human rights of speech and association. I am astounded that Macron has stooped to the level of taking hostages as a means of gaining access to private communications.”
The French president defended the arrests, saying, “In a state governed by the rule of law, freedoms are upheld within the legal framework, both on social media and in real life.”
It then emerged that Emmanuel Macron had met Mr Durov several times, played a key role in fast-tracking his French citizenship, and in 2018, asked him to run Telegram from France. Mr Durov refused, preferring authoritarian Dubai over liberal France as Telegram’s headquarters. In fact, Mr Durov’s entrepreneurial career blurs the easy stereotypes of ‘authoritarian’ and ‘democratic’. For example, right now while his oppressor is a democracy that takes pride in advocating ‘liberté’, those at the forefront of protecting his freedom are two authoritarian regimes – Russia and the UAE. While the UAE has asked France to provide all consular services to the UAE citizen, Russia has warned France against politically motivated prosecution.
Differences with Moscow
Confrontations with governments are nothing new for Mr Durov, whose net worth is estimated at $11.5 billion. Born in Soviet Leningrad in 1984, he grew up in Turin, Italy. While at university in St Petersburg, he discovered Facebook, which led him to create a Russian social network, VKontakte, in September 2006. It became a huge success, achieving a $3 billion valuation and 10 million users by April 2008. But he was put under intense pressure from the government to shut down opposition communities. Mr Durov refused, choosing to sell Vkontakte and leave Russia. He then moved to Dubai and founded Telegram, which has become a haven for political dissidents and activists as well as terrorists and drug-traffickers – all attracted by the lax moderation on the platform.
In 2018, Russia banned Telegram after Mr Durov refused to comply with requests to hand over Ukrainian users’ data. The ban was lifted in 2021, with Russia accepting Telegram’s style of operation. Ironically, Telegram is highly popular in both Ukraine and Russia – two countries that are at war, but are united in their trust in a platform that puts user privacy above compliance with law enforcement requests. Both the Ukrainian and Russian governments are using Telegram for propaganda purposes. If France is building a case for Mr Durov’s criminal complicity, it cannot ignore the fact that as a Russian citizen, he refused to sell out the people of Ukraine to the Russian government.
Mr Durov’s radical anti-establishment sentiment dates back to a 2013 incident when he accidentally ran over a policeman in St Petersburg. In reference to this, he posted on social media, “When you run over a policeman, it is important to drive back and forth so that all the blame falls out.” His arrest is certainly a shift in terms of holding a tech business accountable for the content on their platform. But the response it has generated suggests that this may remain an isolated incident, not one that will become the norm.