“When I turned 11 in 1995, I made a promise to myself to become smarter, stronger and freer every day. Today Telegram turns 11 and is ready to make that same promise.” This is the last message from entrepreneur Pavel Durov (Saint Petersburg, 39 years old). He posted it on August 14 on his Telegram channel, a company he founded with his brother Nikolai in 2013. Ironically, this relentless search for freedom above all else has led him to prison, so far only as a defendant.
The billionaire was arrested on Saturday at Le Bourget airport, on the outskirts of Paris. His arrest is part of a police investigation focused on Telegram’s lack of cooperation with justice. Authorities believe that this encrypted messaging platform allows the development of criminal activities of all kinds, from paedophile networks to drug trafficking, organised crime and the promotion of terrorism. And that Durov puts freedom and the lack of control on his platform before the pursuit of these crimes.
“The problem is not that there are people who commit crimes, that happens on all platforms, the problem is that you do not collaborate to stop them,” explains Borja Adsuara, a lawyer specializing in digital law, in a telephone conversation. “For not doing so, they can be accused of obstructing justice. Not of collaboration, because it is not active collaboration.”
Dubai-based Telegram has 950 million active users and is reportedly planning to go public this year, as Durov himself said in an interview with The Financial Times. The tycoon then said that he had rejected purchase offers worth 30 billion dollars (27.437 billion euros). This application has become an increasingly used alternative to WhatsApp. However, it has some differences with the Meta application. Telegram allows the creation of groups of up to 200,000 members, which also makes it a content platform. These groups are created around common interests: they can be political, cultural or information on a specific topic. Audiovisual piracy groups are also proliferating. For this reason, the judge of the National Court Santiago Pedraz ordered the preventive closure of the platform in Spain last March, in a strange order that blocked the service in Spain and that the judge himself annulled a few days later.
This ability to create open communities, but with a great zeal for privacy, made Telegram from its inception a force of resistance and a nuisance for tyrants. Authoritarian leaders in Russia and Iran tried to ban it. The app played a significant role in popular uprisings in Ukraine, Belarus and Hong Kong.
In recent years, however, Telegram has become a haven for a different kind of resistance. Things began to change rapidly in 2021, when the platform became overrun with conspiracy theorists, racists and far-right agitators. The trigger was the storming of the Capitol by a mob of supporters of former US President Donald Trump. Social media played a major role in this insurrection. So in the days that followed, Twitter and Facebook took action with a purge of users they deemed responsible for inciting violence or spreading disinformation. 25 million new users flocked to Telegram. Durov said it had been “the largest digital migration in human history.”
This cascade of new users did not slow down dramatically over time; it continued in a steady stream. Competing messaging service WhatsApp had introduced global limits on message forwarding in 2019, after it was accused of allowing the spread of false information in India that led to lynchings. But Telegram had no such restrictions and many disinformation and far-right communicators saw it as a platform tailored to their needs. In Spain, MEP Alvise Pérez and agitator Vito Quiles are the greatest exponents of a global trend.
Telegram has not only become a way of spreading disinformation, it is also an excellent place to make money from it. A recent study by the University of La Sapienza (Rome) estimated that conspiracy channels had managed to raise 84.7 million euros from more than 985,000 contributors in recent years through various projects. That is why Durov’s arrest has a political dimension. Far-right communicators around the world (from Alvise in Spain to Tucker Carlson in the United States) have been quick to point to the billionaire as a martyr for freedom. The truth is that, looking into his biography, one could say that he is.
Pavel Durov graduated in philology from St. Petersburg State University in the 2000s. A brilliant student, he designed several websites for exchanging notes, but it was the creation of Russian Facebook in 2006 that launched him into fame. In 2011, the Russian secret services asked him to hand over information on several political opponents. Durov refused. Two years later, they knocked on his door again, asking him to identify the Ukrainian citizens who had taken part in the pro-European Maidan protests. Durov again resisted, but, knowing that he was in the Kremlin’s crosshairs, he sold his company and went abroad to work on a new platform, far from Putin’s clutches.
Durov’s obsession with Internet freedom and user anonymity has been total ever since. The problem is that the tycoon has shown the same conviction when confronting authoritarian regimes that seek dissidents or judges in democratic countries that want to curb the spread of paedophile content or piracy.
The app is not responsible for the existence of this content. “They are not like a newspaper,” says Adsuara. “Since the first law that was passed in the US in 1996, the Communications Decency Act, and then in Europe in 2000, the e-commerce directive, the principle of exemption from liability for the content that we users share was established,” he recalls. The users are responsible, not the owners of the platform. But the platform has to cooperate when asked, the expert recalls. “If here, even the smallest of SMEs are forced to comply with the regulations, the owners of the large platforms are not going to be an exception.” This is the real problem with Telegram, Adsuara emphasises: that Durov has put the anonymity of his users before cooperation with justice.
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