“When I turned 11 in 1995, I made a promise to myself that I would be smarter, stronger, and freer every day. Today, Telegram turns 11 and is ready to make the same promise. This is the entrepreneur’s latest message Pavel Durov (St. Petersburg, 39). He published 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 landed him in prison, so far only as an accused.
The billionaire He was arrested this Saturday at Le Bourget airport, on the outskirts of Paris. His arrest is part of a police investigation into Telegram's lack of cooperation with the justice system. The authorities believe that this encrypted messaging platform enables the development of criminal activities of all kinds, from pedophile networks to drug trafficking, including organized crime and the promotion of terrorism. And that Dúrov places freedom and lack of control in his agenda before the pursuit of these crimes.
“The problem is not that there are people committing crimes, it happens on all platforms, the problem is that you do not collaborate to stop them,” he explains in a telephone conversation. Borja Adsuaralawyer expert in digital law. “If you don't do it, you can be charged with obstruction of justice. No collaboration, because it's not active collaboration.
Dubai-based Telegram has 950 million active users and is planning an IPO this year, as is Dúrov himself. He confessed in an interview with Financial Time. The tycoon had then declared that he had rejected purchase offers worth 30 billion dollars (27.437 million 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. This is why the judge of the National Court, Santiago Pedraz, ordered the preventive closure of the platform in Spain last March, in A strange car that blocked the service in Spain and which the judge himself annulled a few days later.
This ability to create open communities, but with a great zeal for privacy, has made Telegram from its inception an engine of resistance and a nuisance to tyrants. Authoritarian leaders in Russia and Iran have tried to ban it. The app has 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 filled with conspiracists, racists, and far-right agitators. The trigger was the storming of the capitol by a crowd of supporters of former US President Donald Trump. Social media played a significant role in this insurrection. So in the following days, Twitter and Facebook took action by purging users they considered responsible for inciting violence or spreading false information. 25 million new users flocked to Telegram. Durov called it “the largest digital migration in human history.”
This cascade of new users has not drastically diminished over time, it has continued in a steady stream. Rival messaging service WhatsApp introduced global limits on message forwarding in 2019 after being accused of enabling the spread of misinformation in India. which caused lynchings. But Telegram did not have these restrictions and many communicators of disinformation and the far right saw here a platform adapted to their needs. In Spain, the MEP Alvise Pérez or the agitator Vito Quiles are the greatest representatives of a global trend. Telegram has not only become a means of transmitting disinformation, it is also an excellent place to make money. A recent study by Sapienza University (Rome) calculated that conspiracy channels had managed to collect 84.7 million euros through various projects, from over 985,000 contributors in recent years. This 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) were quick to label the billionaire a martyr for freedom. The truth is that, delving into his biography, one could say that he is.
Pavel Dúrov graduated in philology from St. Petersburg State University in the 2000s. A brilliant student, he designed several note-sharing sites, but it was the creation of the Russian Facebook in 2006 that made him famous. In 2011, Russian intelligence asked him to provide information on several political opponents. Durov refused. Two years later, they came knocking on his door again, asking him to identify the Ukrainian citizens who had participated. in the anti-Russian Maidan protestsDurov still resisted, but knowing that he was in the Kremlin's crosshairs, he sold his company and went to work abroad on a new platform, far from Putin's clutches.
Since then, Dúrov's obsession with Internet freedom and user anonymity has been total. The problem is that the tycoon has shown the same conviction when faced with authoritarian regimes looking for dissidents, or judges in democratic countries who want to stop the spread of paedophile content or piracy.
The application is not responsible for the existence of this content. “It’s not like a newspaper,” Adsuara explains. “Since the first law that was passed in this regard in 1996 in the United States, the Telecommunications Decency Act, and then in Europe, in 2000, the Electronic Commerce Directorate, the principle of exemption from liability for the content that we, users, share,” he recalls. The users are responsible, not the owners of the platform. But it must cooperate when asked, the expert recalls. “If here we force even the smallest SMEs to comply with the regulations, those of large platforms will not be an exception.” This is the real problem with Telegram, the expert emphasizes, because Dúrov has put the anonymity of its users before cooperation with the courts.
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