Russia on Thursday warned France not to turn the investigation of Pavel Durov, the boss of Telegram, into a “political persecution” after the billionaire 39-year-old CEO was put under formal investigation relating to activities on his social media platform.
Moscow has implied there are political motivations behind the arrest of Durov, who was detained Saturday as he disembarked his private jet at Paris-Le Bourget airport, near the French capital.
“The main thing is for what is happening in France not to run into political persecution,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday. “Of course, we consider him a Russian citizen and, as much as possible, we will be ready to provide assistance. We will be watching what happens next,” Peskov said.
France strongly denies there are any political objectives behind his arrest and maintains the investigation is being conducted according to the rule of law.
Durov holds joint Russian, French and United Arab Emirates citizenship. He was released from police custody Wednesday evening on $5.6 million bail. He is banned from leaving France and must report to a police station twice a week.
TJ McIntyre, an associate professor at University College Dublin’s School of Law and an expert on technology law and cybercrime, said Durov faces a range of preliminary charges, “ranging from failure to take action on the sale of drugs on Telegram, failure to prevent the distribution of child sexual abuse material on Telegram, failure to provide information on users when requested as part of criminal investigations, going so far as to include accusations of money laundering.”
McIntyre added that it was unusual for the CEO of a social media website to be held liable for the content it hosts. “Now, he has, himself, been indicted, which takes the investigation to the next level.”
The preliminary charges, which were outlined Wednesday in a statement by Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, also appear to concern allegations involving organized crime, including “complicity in the administration of an online platform to enable an illicit transaction.”
Speaking outside the courthouse in Paris on Wednesday, Pavel Durov’s lawyer rejected the allegations. “Firstly, Telegram complies in every respect with European digital regulations and is moderated to the same standards as other social networks,” lawyer David-Olivier Kaminski told reporters.
“I’d like to add that it’s totally absurd to think that the head of a social network could be involved in criminal acts that don’t concern him either directly or indirectly,” Kaminski said.
Durov founded Telegram a decade ago. After reportedly facing regulatory pressures in his native Russia, Durov chose Dubai as the company’s headquarters, gaining UAE citizenship in 2021. Local media report that he was given French citizenship later the same year. His wealth is estimated by Forbes at upwards of $15 billion.
While other social media platforms have frequently been accused of harboring illegal content, French investigators say Telegram repeatedly failed to engage with regulators or to comply with laws on moderation.
“They are widely perceived as being a scofflaw when it comes to taking down illegal content posted by users. And if that’s true, if they were notified of specific content by users that violated the law and they didn’t take it down, then they’ve forfeited immunity under the big EU law on this, the Digital Services Act,” said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford Law School’s Cyber Policy Center.
Telegram made a point of refusing to comply with laws on content moderation, said McIntyre. “You have a lot of aggressive rhetoric from the owner saying in essence that this is a service which is dedicated to freedom of expression, [and] it will set out to refuse a lot of state requests. And that I think has come back to bite him now.”
Other social media platforms will be watching closely, according to Keller.
“I think we should assume that most ordinary big platforms, the Facebooks, the YouTubes, etc., are not endangered by this. They have massive teams operating content moderation systems and … removing illegal content if they’re notified about it. I don’t think they could be subject to charges like this.
“Now it may be that X, Elon Musk’s platform, actually has been dropping the ball on doing these things. Certainly, that’s something that EU Commissioner [for Internal Market and Services] Thierry Breton has alleged.”
Elon Musk, the owner of X — formerly Twitter — posted online in support of Durov this week, reposting comments he made in a March interview that moderation was “a propaganda word for censorship.”
Musk is likely worried about the implications of Durov’s arrest, said McIntyre.
“I think Mr. Musk shares a lot of his views with this particular defendant, and I think he would be rightly worried as to the implications of this for him and for his service in Europe in general. But it might not be as extreme a case as Telegram.
“Certainly, there are issues with Twitter [X] failing to respond to government requests, failing to take proper steps to moderate its content. And it’s not impossible that you’d see a similar action taken against him personally,” McIntyre told VOA.
Telegram has more than 900 million global users, including in Russia and Iran. It is widely used by the Russian and Ukrainian militaries in Moscow’s war on Ukraine. The platform does not use end-to-end encryption.
“To some extent, it gives this defendant a good deal of leverage — in that if he were to promise cooperation on some of these fronts, there would be a lot of very valuable information that he would have that could be made available to, for example, the French authorities. As a lawyer, I can only speak to the judicial procedure, but what happens behind the scenes may be as influential as the judicial procedure itself,” McIntyre said.
French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X that the arrest of Durov was in no way a political decision. “France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship.”
Russia has in the past blocked access to Telegram after it refused to give state security services access to private conversations, and that move prompted large street protests in Moscow in 2018. Additionally, some Russian lawmakers are now accusing France of censorship.
