France detains Telegram CEO

War bloggers and small-time weed dealers alike will have woken up this morning to some pretty bad news for their favourite messaging app.

French authorities arrested the Russian-born CEO of Telegram over the weekend: 39-year-old Pavel Durov. He’d just flown in on his private jet from Azerbaijan, and French authorities are due to release a statement today (Monday).

In the meantime, bits have been leaking out via French media. Let’s take a look.

First, who’s Pavel Durov?

He founded VK (Russia’s Facebook clone) back in 2007, but says the Kremlin later strong-armed him into selling it to oligarchs. He then founded Telegram in 2013, and claims he fled Russia in 2014 after a dispute with the Kremlin. He’s now worth billions, is based in Dubai (as is Telegram), and has UAE and French passports (it’s unclear if he still has Russian citizenship).

Second, what’s Telegram?

It’s kind of a cross between WhatsApp (private messaging) and Facebook/Twitter (broadcasting to vast audiences), with almost a billion users.

Telegram’s lax moderation means it’s also kinda the Wild West: this initially made it popular among dissidents in Russia, Belarus, and Iran, but you can now find anything there, from chats about horse-riding and updates from your dad, to a portal for CIA recruits, (dis)information on the Russo-Ukraine war, plus a lot of criminal stuff.

So, why do folks use it?

In addition to its approach to content, Telegram brands itself as encrypted and therefore secure, but there are a couple of sources of doubt here –

First, the tech itself:

• a) you’ve gotta manually turn encryption on each time (most don’t)
• b) your host devices can still be seized, stolen, or compromised (as with any other ‘encrypted’ app)
• c) endless third party applications bring a whole other source of risk, and
• d) the app’s vaunted privacy also means spooks can (as on other platforms) go old-school and pose as a fellow dissident.

Second, some dissidents now suspect the app has ties with Moscow, citing instances of authorities seemingly using Telegram to locate, detain, and threaten them, not to mention the possible sources of leverage via the app’s dependence on Russian users, revenues, and (reportedly) bond-holders.

And that’s all after Moscow went from an attempted banon Telegram in 2018 to a sudden ‘agreement’ in 2021 (something the app denies). Nowadays, you can see a Telegram exec on stage with Russia’s deputy PM one day, and reports of Telegram pulling down a quarter million posts at Moscow’s request the next.

So then, why detain Durov?

French outlets say a child-protection unit first submitted the warrant request, leading to a broader probe around alleged terrorism, drug trafficking, fraud, and beyond. The reported allegations aren’t that Durov is doing this stuff himself, but that he’s breaching French laws requiring he take measures to stop it on his app.

Meanwhile, Telegram has released a statement saying it’s “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform“. And Russia is citing his Russian roots to demand consular access, while highlighting the whole saga as evidence of Western hypocrisy around freedom of speech.

INTRIGUE’S TAKE

While we await further official info from Paris, and watch pundits shoe-horn Durov’s arrest into whatever their latest pet issue is, it’s worth noting there’s a difference between governments pressuring platforms to:

• a) hand over user data (Moscow’s crackdown on democracy activists)
• b) better moderate content (as Paris seems to be pushing here), and
• c) both of the above (eg, Berlin once got Telegram to hand over data on users engaged in terrorism and child exploitation; and Delhi even got Telegram to cough up data on teachers sharing copyrighted material).

But with trust in such short supply, shoe-horners will still inevitably characterise any attempt at nuance as a figleaf for malfeasance.

Either way, we’d love to hear what you think in today’s poll 👇.

Also worth noting:

• US-based platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter remain restricted in Russia via a wartime measure.
• The US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has reported on how many tip-offs each internet platform is submitting – last year, WhatsApp lodged ~1.4 million, while Telegram lodged zero.