Why was Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov arrested?

Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the social media site Telegram, was arrested in Paris on Saturday due to allegations his platform’s users have been engaging in money-laundering, circulation of child sex abuse material, drug trafficking and other illicit activities on the site.
According to The Associated Press, a special unit with France’s interior ministry that investigates crimes against minors requested the arrest warrant be issued by authorities.
Specifically, the Russian billionaire isn’t responsible for posting the content, rather for maintaining lenient moderation strategies that allow for criminal activity and misuse of the platform by its users, according to reports.
The arrest comes in connection to a case opened by the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office on July 8, the office announced in a press release.
Among the charges against Durov in connection to illicit activity hosted on his site are complicity in “web-mastering an online platform in order to enable an illegal transaction in organized group,” “distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in organized group” and “organized fraud.”
The full list of charges can be found in the office’s press release.
After his arrest, authorities questioned Durov and, per the release, his custody period may last 96 hours, or until Aug. 28, according to the “applicable procedure for organized crime offences.”
In a post to its corporate X account, Telegram asserted its significance to its millions of users worldwide and defended itself, noting that the company acts within EU laws. Durov, they argued, is a frequent traveler with nothing to hide.
“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” Telegram asserted in the post.
Durov started Telegram with his brother, Nikolai, in the wake of government crackdowns in Russia on free speech. He sought to develop an uncensored and neutral platform through which he and others could communicate more securely.
Telegram is a messenger app that allows users to engage in conversations with individuals as well as groups. In order to sign up, users need only provide a name and phone number. The lack of identifiable information required during account set-up poses a hurdle in identifying users that use the app for malicious purposes.
The app allows users to have a much greater reach, with up to 200,000 people able to be in one group chat, so information can spread farther and faster, regardless of its accuracy or user intention.
Its end-to end encryption services, which prevent everyone except for the sender and recipients of messages from gaining access to the messages, aren’t default settings, though they can be turned on.
The app’s moderation practices, often accused of being insufficient at detecting criminal activity, have helped it become popular with criminals, per CNBC. Stanford researcher David Thiel said Telegram also “appears basically unresponsive to law enforcement” and submitted no CyberTipline reports in 2023, compared to WhatsApp’s 1.3 million reports, per AP.
Durov left Russia in 2014 and reportedly gained citizenship in St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean. In 2021, he gained French citizenship on an accelerated track only offered 10 to 20 times per year and which requires strong government support, Reuters reported.
Requirements for his citizenship per French law included the ability to speak the French language and that he “contributes through his outstanding work to France’s influence and the prosperity of its international economic relations.”
International use of his app left it — and himself— open to scrutiny by French authorities.