Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the popular social media messaging platform Telegram who is currently facing charges for allowing criminal activity on the platform, made his first public comment since his arrest in France last month.
In a post on Telegram, Durov vowed to increase oversight and moderation on the platform, while also defending both himself and the company, and calling his arrest misguided.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach,” Durov wrote. “Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.”
Durov disputed the characterization of Telegram as “some sort of anarchic paradise” and wrote that the messaging service’s “abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier to abuse our platform.”
Who is Pavel Durov
Durov, the 39-year-old Russian-born tech mogul and Telegram founder, was detained at Le Bourget Airport outside of Paris on August 24, where he was arriving on his private jet from Azerbaijan. An arrest warrant issued by OFMIN, France’s agency responsible for safeguarding minors from violence, accused Durov of failing to cooperate with law enforcement on investigations into child pornography, fraud, drug trafficking, the promotion of terrorism and other crimes on Telegram.
After being questioned for four days, the Associated Press reported that Durov, who maintains citizenship in both France and the United Arab Emirates, was released on 5 million euros bail, and currently has to report to French authorities twice a week.
More:Who is Pavel Durov? What to know about Russian-born Telegram owner arrested in France
Durov, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be around $15.5 billion, founded the social networking site VKontakte, often referred to as Russia’s version of Facebook, in 2006. Along with his brother Nikolai, Durov founded Telegram in 2013. The encrypted messaging platform has since amassed hundreds of millions of users around the world.
Durov fled Russia in 2014, after refusing to turn over encrypted VKontakte data to Russian authorities.
In his post on Thursday, Durov called the allegations that he had refused to cooperate with French investigations into criminal activity on Telegram “surprising for several reasons.”
“The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai,” Durov wrote. “A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.”
He also noted that Telegram maintained an official representative to the European Union to address law enforcement on the platform.
Durov’s post concluded by saying that Telegram has already begun an internal process to crack down on criminal activity.
Eric Lagatta contributed to this report.
Max Hauptman is a Trending Reporter for USA TODAY. He can be reached at MHauptman@gannett.com
