CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov has spoken for the first time since his arrest last month. The Russian-born CEO was arrested in Paris on charges of publishing extremist and illegal content.
Calling his arrest “surprising” and the charges against him “misguided”, Durov promised that changes will be brought to some features in Telegram features in order to “improve” the app’s efforts to prevent criminals from misusing the platform.
The 39-year-old was arrested after he was accused of failing to remove illegal content like child pornography from Telegram. His bail was set at $5.6 million and he is required to report to a police station twice a week.
French authorities said Telegram did not reply to their requests for information regarding suspicious criminal activity on its app, including drug trafficking.
Mr Durov argued that a CEO should not be responsible if a platform is “potentially abused”. Stating that building technology is “hard as it is”, he said that if CEOs were held responsible, no one would ever innovate.
“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. 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,” he said.
Mr Durov also spoke of his arrest saying he was questioned by police for four days. “I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram,” he said, adding that if they wanted to ask for his help, they could have just “Googled Telegram EU address”.
While arguing that the level of moderation on Telegram is low compared to other social media or messaging apps, Mr Durov stated that the platform did remove objectionable content.
“Claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. However, we hear voices saying that it’s not enough,” he said.
He also announced the removal of some features like its blogging tool Telegraph
“While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our almost billion users at risk,” he said.
Citing examples of Iran and Russia, both regimes that he claimed sought to censor and surveil their citizens, the CEO said Telegram was ready to leave any country that abused the app users’ right to privacy.
