The cause of free speech may have found a new icon in Russia-born tech tycoon Pavel Durov, who was arrested in Paris on August 24. Mr. Durov, 39, is the founder of Telegram, a cloud-based social media and instant messaging service with 950 million active users, which makes it bigger than X (540 million users).
French authorities had a warrant out for Mr. Durov and his brother Nikolai as part of a preliminary investigation into allegations that Telegram was enabling criminality through its ‘hands-off’ approach to moderating content. Mr. Durov, as the owner of Telegram, has been charged with complicity in a range of crimes, including drug trafficking, fraud, money-laundering, organised crime, terrorism, cyberbullying, dissemination of child pornographic materials, and refusal to cooperate with law enforcement. Though he has been granted bail on a bond of €5 million, he has been barred from leaving France and must sign in with the police twice a week.
Telegram, in a statement, has said that “it is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform”. a sentiment that goes to the heart of a growing conflict between owners of tech platforms and government regulators who want on-demand access to user information. Tech titans, most of whom veer libertarian in their politics, view these demands as violations of user privacy and free speech.
Mr. Durov, who describes Telegram as “a privacy-focussed social media platform” famously said in 2015, “Privacy, ultimately, is more important than our fear of bad things happening,” — a remark that endeared him to free speech evangelists.
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Understandably, his arrest has sparked a fierce debate on the fine line between free speech rights and law enforcement. Edward Snowden, the celebrated whistleblower, had no doubt whatsoever, posting on X, “The arrest of @Durov is an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association. I am surprised that Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means for gaining access to private communications.”
The French President defended the arrest, stating, “In a state governed by the rule of law, freedoms are upheld within a legal framework, both on social media and in real life.”
It has since emerged that Emmanuel Macron had met with Mr. Durov several times, was instrumental in fast-tracking his French citizenship,, and in 2018, had beseeched him to run Telegram out of France. Mr. Durov refused, preferring authoritarian Dubai to liberal France as Telegram headquarters. Indeed, Mr. Durov’s entrepreneurial career blurs easy stereotypes of ‘authoritarian’ and ‘democratic’. Right now, for instance, while his persecutor is a democracy that takes pride in championing ‘Liberte’, at the forefront of defending his liberty are two authoritarian regimes — Russia and the UAE. While the UAE has asked France to provide all consular services due to a UAE citizen, Russia has warned France against a politically motivated prosecution.
Fall-out with Moscow
Run-ins with governments are not 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 in university at St Petersburg, he discovered Facebook, which inspired him to create a Russian social network, VKontakte, in September 2006. It became a runaway success, garnering a valuation of $3 billion and 10 million users by April 2008. But he came under immense pressure from the government to shut down opposition communities. Mr. Durov refused, opting 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 for 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 data of Ukranian users. The ban was revoked in 2021, with Russia seemingly reconciled to Telegram’s style of operation. Ironically, Telegram is highly popular in both Ukraine and Russia – two countries at war, but united in their trust of a platform that puts user privacy above compliance with law enforcement requests. Both Ukrainian and Russian governments have been 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 Ukrainians to the Russian government.
Mr. Durov’s radical anti-establishment ethos comes through in a 2013 incident where he accidentally ran over a policeman in St Petersburg. In a reference to it, he posted on social media, “When you run over a policeman, it is important to drive back and forth so all the pulp comes out.” His arrest is certainly a departure in terms of holding a tech businessman responsible for the content on their platform. But the backlash it has triggered suggests it might remain an outlier event, unlikely to become the norm.
