French authorities said Monday that they had arrested Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov for failing to moderate illegal child abuse activity on the messaging app -- the most dramatic action so far in the global fight between officials and tech companies over limits to harmful content.
Durov was being temporarily detained on suspicion of involvement with distributing child sex abuse material and drugs, money laundering and working with organized crime, according to a press statement released by French prosecutor Laure Beccuau.
The accusations also included improper use of cryptography, a flash point in the efforts by some governments to force companies to reveal private messages between users.
Durov, a Russian-born billionaire who lives in Dubai, was detained over the weekend at the Bourget airport outside Paris as he landed from Azerbaijan in his private jet, French TV channel TF1 said Saturday night. He is a dual citizen of the United Arab Emirates and France, according to his company.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that Durov’s arrest was part of an “ongoing judicial investigation,” and that politics had played no part in the arrest.
“France is more than anything attached to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation and to the spirit of enterprise,” Macron said in a post on X. “It will remain so.”
X owner Elon Musk and others condemned the arrest as an attack on free speech with drastic implications. Musk posted that the future could include “being executed for liking a meme.” Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of Rumble Video, said France had threatened his online video platform and had crossed “a red line” by taking action against Durov “reportedly for not censoring speech.”
“Arresting platform executives because of their alleged failures to sufficiently moderate content, even content as disturbing and harmful as content that harms children, starts us down a dangerous road that threatens free expression and gives too much power to the government to suppress speech,” said Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology.
Others said Durov’s Telegram flouted the laws on child abuse and other issues in many jurisdictions, and that it boasted that it did not turn over information about users even when communications were not strongly encrypted, as in all group chats.
“Our team at Stanford found that Telegram is a key component of the ecosystem of individuals trading and selling child sexual abuse materials, and is the only major platform to implicitly allow the exchange of CSAM on private channels, many of which are not end-to-end encrypted,” said Alex Stamos, former director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and now chief information security officer at SentinelOne.
Jean-Michel Bernigaud, secretary general of Ofmin, a French police agency focused on preventing violence against minors, said in a LinkedIn post Monday that Durov’s arrest was related to the app’s inability to deal with offensive content against minors.
“At the heart of the case is the absence of moderation and cooperation on the part of the platform,” Bernigaud said, “especially in the fight against child sex crimes.”
Telegram did not immediately return a request for comment.
Telegram is one of the most popular messaging apps globally, with more than 950 million users. French newspaper Le Monde reported that French authorities are investigating the dissemination of child pornography content, cyberbullying and organized crime on the app.
Telegram is one of a number of social media and messaging apps to face complaints about insufficient moderation or failure to act against child sex abuse content, fake news, disinformation, hate speech, and extremist groups and ideologies promoting violence.
Rights and monitoring groups have accused Facebook owner Meta of contributing to real-world violence against the Rohingya community in Myanmar by failing to act against the spread of fake news and hate speech on its platforms.
Meanwhile, a UNESCO study in 2022 concluded that nearly half of Holocaust-related content shared publicly on Telegram contained denial or distortion, a rate higher than Twitter, TikTok or Facebook.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
correction
Pavel Durov's name was misspelled as Duroc in an earlier version of this article. It has been corrected.