The owner of the social media network Telegram, Pavel Durov, has chastised the French government over his detention in August.
Durov stated that rather than detaining him, the French judicial authorities ought to have contacted his company.
The tech entrepreneur, who was born in Russia, posted on his personal Telegram channel that he received a message stating that he “may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.”
That was deemed “surprising for several reasons” by Durov.
He emphasised that Telegram has an official EU representative who receives enquiries from the bloc and responds to them; this representative’s email address is open to the public.
Furthermore, he added, having visited the French consulate in Dubai on several occasions, he had previously assisted in setting up a Telegram hotline to handle concerns related to terrorism.
He stated, “If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.
“Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.”
He said that it was difficult to strike the correct balance between security and privacy because doing so required negotiating a maze of complicated laws, rules, and technological constraints, a process he said called for “open dialogue.”
Concerning Iran and Russia, Durov said: “We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated.”
He said that his business does go to great lengths to control and moderate as needed.
“All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve,” Durov said.
“But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this or this). We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster.”
Durov went on to say that Telegram has gone through “growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform” as a result of its “abrupt increase in user count to 950 million [users]”. He promised to make things better and to streamline the functions of his platform.
The French national who owns Telegram was taken into custody in France at the end of August in connection with an inquiry into offences including alleged child pornography, drug trafficking, and fraudulent transactions over the app.
