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Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is forbidden from leaving French territory after being charged for complicity in running an online platform that allegedly enabled the spread of sexual images of children, creating an uncertain future for the messaging app that has become one of the world’s biggest social media platforms.
Durov was arrested on Saturday at 8 pm local time after his private jet landed at an airport near Paris. He was then detained for four days as part of an investigation into alleged criminal activity taking place on Telegram. On Wednesday evening, local time, he was indicted and forbidden from leaving the country, according to a statement released by the Paris Prosecutor. He was released under judicial supervision, the statement said, and must post a €5 million ($5.5 million) bail and report to a police station in France twice a week.
The Telegram founder was placed under formal investigation for a range of charges related to child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking, importing cryptology without prior declaration, as well as a “near-total absence” of cooperation with French authorities, Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said on Wednesday.
French authorities noted an “almost total lack of response from Telegram to legal requests,” Beccuau noted. “This is what led JUNALCO [the National Jurisdiction for the Fight against Organized Crime] to open an investigation into the possible criminal liability of this messaging service’s executives in the commission of these offenses,” she said. The preliminary investigation began in February 2024 and initial investigations were coordinated by the OFMIN, an agency set up to prevent violence against minors, her statement added.
“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the abuse of that platform,” Telegram said on Sunday, before Durov was charged. The platform, which has 900 million active users, did not immediately respond to a request for comment to the charges.
Since his arrest, both the UAE and Russia have requested consular access to Durov, who has citizenship in both countries. It’s unclear why Durov, who also obtained a French passport after leaving Russia, was in France. “I don’t take holidays,” he said on his Telegram channel in June.
Russia has claimed, without evidence, that Durov’s arrest is an attempt by the United States to exert influence over the platform via France. "Telegram is one of the few and at the same time the largest Internet platforms over which the United States has no influence," Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia's State Duma, the lower house of parliament, said on the app.
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said on Monday that Durov’s detention is “in no way a political decision.” “It is up to the judiciary, in full independence, to enforce the law,” he added in a post on X. The European Commission tells WIRED the arrest was conducted under French criminal law and is not connected to new European regulation for tech platforms. “We are closely monitoring the developments related to Telegram and stand ready to cooperate with the French authorities should it be relevant,” a spokesperson says, declining to be named.
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Once known as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg, Durov has said he got the idea for Telegram when he was still CEO of Vkontakte, the Russian social media company he founded in 2006. Under his leadership, the platform was dogged by allegations it was sharing data with the Kremlin, even as Durov appeared to publicly clash with Russian authorities over the political content VK was hosting. He told The New York Times that when a SWAT team appeared at his St. Petersburg home in 2011, he realized he wanted to contact his brother but had no secure way of doing so. “That’s how Telegram started,” he said.
Telegram was launched in 2013 as the relationship between Durov and the Russian government continued to deteriorate. The following year, authorities searched VK’s offices and police accused Durov of running into and injuring a traffic policeman with a white Mercedes, forcing him into hiding. He eventually resigned from VK in April 2014, selling his stake in the company for an undisclosed figure. That decision left him free to focus instead on Telegram, first in Russia and then later in the UAE, where he set up the platform’s official headquarters in Dubai.
But as Telegram has grown, its laissez-faire attitude towards moderation has attracted ire from politicians around the world who complain about the content circulating on public channels. Both Iran and Thailand banned Telegram, in 2018 and 2020 respectively, amid anti-government protests in both countries. Germany’s interior minister suggested banning the app in 2022, after anti-vaccine Telegram groups were found to be encouraging violence against local politicians. The same year, Brazil briefly banned Telegram after the platform refused to comply with a judicial order. Spain also blocked the app in 2024 after Telegram failed to respond to a judge seeking more information about copyrighted content. That ban, however, was lifted after just three days.
Telegram has always maintained that it removes illegal content and complies with EU law. But Durov has been outspoken about the platform’s commitment to freedom of speech and freedom from algorithmic feeds that prioritize some posts over others.
During the pandemic, he criticized his competitors’ willingness to remove content labeled as conspiracy theories. “Just a year ago, the idea that the virus originated from a Wuhan Lab was dismissed as a conspiracy theory,” he said on Telegram in 2021, noting that other platforms, including Facebook, blocked those posts, while Telegram did not. “Today, however, this theory is on its way to becoming the mainstream scientific view of how the virus originated,” Durov said, linking to an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal headlined “The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak.” This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee that Facebook was under pressure during the pandemic to “censor” content related to Covid-19.
Aside from conspiracy theories, over the years Telegram has also been criticized for hosting content that ranges from child sexual abuse images to deepfake scammer groups and doxing. A Telegram spokesperson told WIRED earlier this year that the platform “has moderated harmful content on our platform since its creation.”
Still, the way Durov was arrested off his private plane on an airport outside Paris has left leaders of other platforms concerned. “The unsealed charges against Durov are insane,” Andy Yen, CEO of encrypted email service Proton, said on X. If sustained, I don't see how tech founders could possibly travel to France … These charges could apply to any social media company.”
Updated 4:40 pm ET, August 28, 2024: Added additional details about the charges against Durov and statements from the Paris Prosecutor.
