France Telegram founder Durow promises improvement in moderation

The founder of the messaging service Telegram, Pavel Durov, has spoken out for the first time after his days-long arrest in Paris in a lengthy post and thanked his fans for their support.

He also rejected the French authorities' accusations that Telegram did not respond to official requests. On the contrary, he had already provided help himself.

"Telegram has an official representative in the EU who accepts and responds to requests from the EU," Durow announced on the social network. The 39-year-old is at large on conditional release and is not allowed to leave France.

According to him, there was no reason to arrest him for allegedly failing to cooperate with the authorities because he is a frequent guest at the French consulate in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai, his adopted home. "When I was asked some time ago, I personally helped them set up a hotline with Telegram to counter the terror threat in France," he said.

Investigators in Paris accuse Durow of not cooperating sufficiently with authorities in criminal investigations and legally permissible wiretapping measures. Durow is suspected of being complicit in drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud and several offenses related to child abuse by failing to intervene in Telegram and failing to cooperate with authorities.

Durov criticizes "misguided approach" in France

Durov rejected accusations that Telegram is a paradise for anarchists. "We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish transparency reports every day," wrote Durow. At the same time, he admitted that this was probably not enough and that Telegram, which has more than 950 million users, wanted to become much better at moderating content. Durow held out the prospect of progress in the near future. The aim is for the network industry as a whole to become stronger and more secure.

In his post, Durow also criticized the fact that managers were being prosecuted for crimes committed by third parties using laws from an era before smartphones existed. This is a "misguided approach", he said. "No innovator will ever develop new tools if they know that they can be held personally responsible for any misuse of these tools."

It is a difficult balancing act to operate globally on the one hand and to please every country on the other. The network is open to dialog, but the principle is to protect users in authoritarian states. Sometimes there is also no agreement between the need to protect privacy and the security interests of the authorities. "In these cases, we are prepared to leave the country. We have already done this many times." In the past, Telegram has also refused to hand over encryption codes to Russian and Iranian authorities for the purpose of monitoring users.

SDA