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.

EDITORIAL | ​Reasonable restrictions: On Telegram CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest and content hosting

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.

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.