Pavel Durov is the billionaire founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app. On Saturday evening, he was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris.
TF1’s website said Durov was traveling aboard his private jet. It added that an arrest warrant in France had targeted him as part of a preliminary police investigation.
TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram. Police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to continue undeterred on the messaging app.
Bitcoin reports that Telegram facilitates crimes like drug trafficking and fraud due to its anonymity features. Durov faces serious charges, including terrorism and narcotics trafficking. They want to put him away for a long time – 20 years.
His stock plummeted.
Russian-born Durov founded Telegram and based it in Dubai. Durov left Russia in 2014. He refused to shut down opposition communities on his VK social media platform. He ended up selling it.
It wasn’t the Russians who arrested him. It was the French, an allegedly free country. They nabbed him for “criminal” lack of moderators on his app.
He refused to propagandize his neutral messaging app and left Russia. Forbes reports that he has accumulated a fortune of $15.5 billion.
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Not Enough Moderators, Facilitating Hate
Telegram has faced controversy recently after Durov said in an interview that the app employs only around 30 engineers. That comment, made in an April 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, raised concerns about Telegram’s underinvestment in user privacy and security.
Telegram’s moderation policies have been reportedly lax since the app’s conception, and the app’s privacy and encryption policies are known to attract groups looking to spread hateful content. The platform has faced issues of misinformation and hate speech, especially antisemitic speech following October 7, 2023.
Some believe they are mostly concerned about the freedom of speech the app offers and came up with these charges to shut it down.
The most important thing to him is freedom, and he now sits in prison for it.
When Tucker interviewed him, Pavel said US intelligence wanted him to give them a backdoor into the app so they could spy on users.
Telegram owner Pavel Durov recently told @TuckerCarlson that the FBI approached a Telegram engineer, attempting to secretly hire him to install a backdoor that would allow U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on users.
Now he’s been apprehended in France, reportedly facing 20yrs! pic.twitter.com/O2Vb6QeTJZ
— Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) August 24, 2024
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