French prosecutors indicted the chief executive of popular messaging service Telegram Wednesday on charges of complicity in the distribution of child sex abuse images, aiding organized crime and refusing lawful orders to give information to law enforcement.
Prosecutors charged Pavel Durov with multiple offenses after four days of questioning following his arrest at an airport near Paris, ordering him to put up a 5 million euro bond and barring him from leaving France.
The 39-year-old billionaire’s case is an unprecedented test of the power of governments over multinational tech companies operating under widely varying laws around the world. Durov’s Telegram is unusual for being run from a nonaligned Middle Eastern country, the United Arab Emirates, and for declaring that it shares no information with authorities anywhere about messages or activities on the site.
Durov has French and UAE citizenship, having moved out of Russia in 2014 amid what he said was a dispute with authorities there over what he would turn over about users of the social network he started, VKontakte.
While X owner Elon Musk and others have decried the investigation of Durov as a challenge to hands-off content moderation, child safety advocates say Telegram permits more illegal activity, including abuse images, than any other major network. It has some 950 million total users and is especially popular in Russia, elsewhere in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
This is a developing story.