Growing pains aided criminal abuse on platform: Telegram CEO Durov

By Aisha Counts

Telegram Chief Executive Officer Pavel Durov defended the encrypted messaging app in his first public comments since being arrested in Paris last month, while acknowledging that the company’s rapid growth to 950 million users has resulted in “growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform.”

The social media billionaire was charged in France last week for failing to stop the spread of illicit content on the app, including child sex abuse material and drug sales. Telegram has frequently drawn criticism from governments including the European Union and authoritarian regimes in Russia and Iran over content on the platform, which has become a gathering place for conspiracy theorists and extremists.

Durov, 39, has historically taken a mostly hands-off approach to moderating content on the app, declining to respond to legal requests or cooperate with law enforcement agencies, according to Paris authorities. In his post on Telegram Thursday, Pavel said the messaging platform has been cooperative with EU requests and that the site takes down millions of harmful posts each day.

“All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect,” he wrote. “But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue.” Durov said he plans to improve the way the site handles harmful content and make it easier for authorities to send requests to the app.

Still, he made it clear he believes his detention in France was an overreach, arguing that governments should take “legal action against the service itself,” rather than hold executives personally responsible. 

“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,” he wrote. “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.”

The charges Durov currently faces could result in up to 10 years in jail. Telegram was launched in 2013 as a messaging platform similar to WhatsApp and has evolved into an everything app that also provides services including news feeds, shopping and games. 

Durov has drawn support from X owner Elon Musk and others in the social media industry over his arrest’s implications for free speech.