Paris:

Telegram founder and chief executive Pavel Durov said Monday that the messaging platform had removed more “problematic content”, 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”.

“We won’t let bad actors jeopardise the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users,” he said.

Durov was arrested on August 24 as he arrived at Le Bourget airport outside Paris on a private jet.

After days of questioning, he was charged with several counts of failing to curb extremist and terrorist content and released on a five-million-euro ($5.6 million) bail.

During the investigation he must remain in France and report to police twice a week.

Durov — who holds Russian, French and United Arab Emirates passports — initially criticised his arrest, but he has since announced steps appearing to bow to Paris’s demands.

On September 6, he said Telegram would alter its “people nearby” feature to present users with “legitimate businesses” rather than “bots and scammers”.

“This year we are committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise,” he said at the time.

Durov, an enigmatic figure who rarely speaks in public, has a fortune estimated at $15.5 billion by Forbes magazine, but touts the virtues of an ascetic life that includes ice baths and not drinking alcohol or coffee.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

There is also no suggestion that Pavel Durov himself was engaged in making any illegal content (file).

The following day, a French judge extended Durov’s initial period of detention, allowing police to detain him for up to 96 hours.

Telegram has rejected the allegations against Durov. In a statement, the company said:

It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.

The case may have far-reaching international implications, not just for Telegram but for other global technology giants as well.

Who is Pavel Durov?

Born in Russia in 1984, Pavel Durov also has French citizenship. This might explain why he felt free to travel despite his app’s role in the Russia-Ukraine War and its widespread use by extremist groups and criminals more generally.

Durov started an earlier social media site, VKontakte, in 2006, which remains very popular in Russia. However, a dispute with how the new owners of the site were operating led to him leaving the company in 2014.

It was shortly before this that Durov created Telegram. This platform provides both the means for communication and exchange as well as the protection of encryption that makes crimes harder to track and tackle than ever before. But that same protection also enables people to resist authoritarian governments that seek to prevent dissent or protest.

Durov also has connections with famed tech figures Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and enjoys broad support in the vocally libertarian tech community. But his platform is no stranger to legal challenges – even in his birth country.

An odd target

Pavel Durov is in some ways an odd target for French authorities.

Meta’s WhatsApp messenger app is also encrypted and boasts three times as many users, while X’s provocations for hate speech and other problematic content are unrepentantly public and increasingly widespread.

There is also no suggestion that Durov himself was engaged with making any illegal content. Instead, he is accused of indirectly facilitating illegal content by maintaining the app in the first place.

However, Durov’s unique background might go some way to suggest why he was taken in.

Unlike other major tech players, he lacks US citizenship. He hails from a country with a chequered past of internet activity – and a diminished diplomatic standing globally thanks to its war against Ukraine.

His app is large enough to be a global presence. But simultaneously it is not large enough to have the limitless legal resources of major players such as Meta.

Combined, these factors make him a more accessible target to test the enforcement of expanding regulatory frameworks.

A question of moderation

Durov’s arrest marks another act in the often confusing and contradictory negotiation of how much responsibility platforms shoulder for the content on their sites.

These platforms, which include direct messaging platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp but also broader services such as those offered by Meta’s Facebook and Musk’s X, operate across the globe.

As such, they contend with a wide variety of legal environments.

This means any restriction put on a platform ultimately affects its services everywhere in the world – complicating and frequently preventing regulation.

On one side, there is a push to either hold the platforms responsible for illegal content or to provide details on the users who post it.

In Russia, Telegram itself was under pressure to provide names of protesters organising through its app to protest the war against Ukraine.

Conversely, freedom of speech advocates have fought against users being banned from platforms. Meanwhile, political commentators cry foul of being “censored” for their political views.

These contradictions make regulation difficult to craft, while the platforms’ global nature makes enforcement a daunting challenge. This challenge tends to play in platforms’ favour, as they can exercise a relatively strong sense of platform sovereignty in how they decide to operate and develop.

However, these complications can obscure the ways platforms can operate directly as deliberate influencers of public opinion and even publishers of their own content.

To take one example, both Google and Facebook took advantage of their central place in the information economy to advertise politically orientated content to resist the development and implementation of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code.

The platforms’ construction also directly influences what content can appear and what content is recommended – and hate speech can mark an opportunity for clicks and screen time.

Now, pressure is increasing to hold platforms responsible for how they moderate their users and content. In Europe, recent regulations such as the Media Freedom Act aim to prevent platforms from arbitrarily deleting or banning news producers and their content, while the Digital Services Act requires that these platforms provide mechanisms for removing illegal material.

Australia has its own Online Safety Act to prevent harm through platforms, though the recent case involving X reveals that its capacity may be quite limited.

Future implications

Durov is currently only being detained, and it remains to be seen what, if anything, will happen to him in the coming days.

But if he is charged and successfully prosecuted, it could lay the groundwork for France to take wider actions against not only tech platforms, but also their owners. It could also embolden nations around the world – in the West and beyond – to undertake their own investigations.

In turn, it may also make tech platforms think far more seriously about the criminal content they host.

Timothy Koskie, Postdoctoral researcher, School of Media and Communications, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, French local media said, citing unnamed sources.
They said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.

Telegram did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The French Interior Ministry and police had no comment. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it was taking steps to “clarify” the situation and questioned whether Western non-governmental organizations (NGOs) would seek his release..

What is known about Durov and Telegram:

* Russian-born Durov, 39, is the founder and owner of messaging app Telegram, a free-to-use platform that competes with other social media platforms such as Facebook’s WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and WeChat. The platform aims to surpass one billion active monthly users within a year.

* Telegram is influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. It has become a critical source of information on Russia’s war in Ukraine, used heavily by both Moscow and Kyiv officials. Some analysts call the app “a virtual battlefield” for the war.

* Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, 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.

* Russian and French media say Durov became a French citizen in 2021. He moved himself and Telegram to Dubai in 2017.

* “I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone,” Durov told US journalist Tucker Carlson in April about his exit from Russia and search for a home for his company which included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.

* In the same interview, Durov said that, beyond money or Bitcoin, he had no major property such as real estate, jets or yachts, as he wanted to be free.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)