French judicial authorities on Sunday extended the detention of the Russian-born founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, after his arrest at a Paris airport over alleged offences related to the messaging app.
His arrest at the Le Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday was the latest extraordinary twist in the career of one of the world’s most influential tech icons.
The detention of Durov, 39, was extended beyond Sunday night by the investigating magistrate who is handling the case, according to a source close to the investigation. This initial period of detention for questioning can last up to a maximum of 96 hours.
When this phase of detention ends, the judge can decide to free him or press charges and remand in further custody.
French investigators had issued a warrant for Durov’s arrest as part of an inquiry into allegations of fraud, drug trafficking, organised crime, promotion of terrorism and cyberbullying.
Durov is accused of failing to take action to curb the criminal use of his platform and was stopped after arriving in Paris from Baku on his private jet on Saturday night. “Enough of Telegram’s impunity,” said one investigator who expressed surprise that Durov flew to Paris knowing he was a wanted man.
In a statement on Sunday evening, Telegram said: “Telegram abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act – its moderation is within industry standards and constantly improving.
“Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe. It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform. We’re awaiting a prompt resolution of this situation.”
Russian authorities have accused France of “refusing to cooperate”. The Russian embassy in Paris has asked for access to Durov and said France had so far “avoided engagement” on the situation.
Durov left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with Kremlin demands to shut down opposition groups on the VK social network that he founded when he was 22. He left VK after a dispute with its Kremlin-linked owners and turned his focus to Telegram, the app he founded with his brother Nikolai in 2013.
Initially, Telegram was similar to other messaging apps, but has since diverged to become more of a social network in its own right. As well as communicating one-to-one, users can join groups of up to 200,000 people and create broadcast “channels” that others can follow and leave comments on.
With 950 million active monthly users, Telegram has become a major source of information – and disinformation – about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Durov lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based, and holds citizenship of France and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He recently said he had tried to settle in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco before choosing Dubai, which he praised for its business environment and “neutrality”.
In the UAE, Telegram faces little pressure to moderate its content, while western governments are trying to crack down on hate speech, disinformation, sharing of images of child abuse and other illegal content.
Telegram offers encrypted messaging and allows users to create channels to disseminate information to followers. Especially popular in the former Soviet Union, the app is widely used by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and his circle, as well as politicians throughout Ukraine, to release information about the war. It is also one of the few places where Russians can get unfiltered information about the conflict, after the Kremlin tightened media controls in the wake of the full-scale invasion.
It has also become a haven for extremists and conspiracy theorists. Investigative journalists at the central European news site VSquare said it had become the “‘go-to’ tool for Russian propagandists, both leftwing and rightwing radicals, American QAnon and conspiracy theorists,” concluding it was an “ecosystem for the radicalisation of opinion”.
The app was also used widely by far-right agitators plotting anti-immigration rallies in England and Northern Ireland in the wake of the stabbing of three children at a Southport dance class last month.
The anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate concluded that Telegram had become the “app of choice” for racists and violent extremists and “a cesspit of antisemitic content” with minimal moderation or effort from the app to curb extremist content.
The former Russian president turned hawkish deputy head of Russia’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev, claimed that Durov had made a mistake by fleeing Russia and thinking he would never have to cooperate with security services abroad. “He miscalculated,” Medvedev said. “For all our common enemies now, he is Russian – and therefore unpredictable and dangerous.”
Writing on X after the arrest, the rightwing US commentator and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson described Durov as “a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies”.
In an interview with Carlson earlier this year, Durov said the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not “a player in geopolitics”.
In the interview, Durov said users “love the independence” of the Telegram app. “They also love the privacy, the freedom, [there are] a lot of reasons why somebody would switch to Telegram.”
The billionaire social media tycoon Elon Musk reposted a clip from that interview where Durov praised Musk’s takeover of X as “a great development” with the hashtag “FreePavel”. He followed up with a second tweet: “Liberté! Liberté! Liberté?”
• This article was amended on 26 August 2024 to remove the description of Telegram’s encryption being “end-to-end” and “apparently unbreakable”.
