Pavel Durov, CEO and co-founder of Telegram, is pictured onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015 on Sept. 21, 2015, in San Francisco.
Steve Jennings/Getty Photos for TechCrunch
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Steve Jennings/Getty Photos for TechCrunch
Pavel Durov, the co-founder and chief govt of the messaging service Telegram, was arrested and detained on Saturday, in line with French media reviews.
The Paris prosecutor’s workplace informed NPR {that a} assertion concerning the matter might be issued on Monday.
Legislation enforcement brokers reportedly arrested Durov at Le Bourget Airport outdoors of Paris, the place he was arriving on his non-public jet from Azerbaijan, in line with a number of French press reviews.
AFP reported that an arrest warrant had been issued for Durov because of an investigation into whether or not he has didn’t crack down on criminality together with drug trafficking, the promotion of terrorism and fraud on Telegram.
The French newspaper Le Monde reported that the probe is inspecting whether or not Durov has refused to cooperate with regulation enforcement over points together with cyberscams and the unfold of kid pornography on Telegram.
“Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to cover and travels regularly in Europe,” Telegram mentioned in an announcement on Sunday. “It’s absurd to assert {that a} platform or its proprietor are accountable for abuse of that platform.”
The corporate additionally mentioned it abides by European Union legal guidelines and that its “moderation is inside business requirements and always enhancing.”
The Russian Embassy in France launched an announcement saying it had requested French authorities for a proof for Durov’s detention and requested that his rights be protected and consular entry be granted.
Durov, a 39-year-old Russian-born billionaire, is a twin citizen of France and the United Arab Emirates, the place he runs Telegram, the Dubai-based messaging service with almost 1 billion world customers.
He’s thought of “Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg” for in 2007 founding VKontakte, Russian for “in contact,” a Fb copycat web site that grew to become the nation’s hottest social community.
In 2013, Durov and his brother, Nikolai, launched Telegram. Pavel Durov fled Russia a 12 months later after his refusal handy over information on Ukrainian customers of VK to Russian authorities.
When Telegram first began, cryptocurrency fanatics have been fast to embrace it, and the app has since risen to change into one of the crucial well-liked messaging providers on this planet. It has emerged as a go-to place for unfiltered updates on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Telegram has a laissez-faire strategy to moderating content material, which has drawn concern from researchers, who’ve famous how misinformation, extremism and illicit exercise, like drug gross sales and little one pornography, typically goes unmoderated.
Some consultants have even suspected that Telegram might need hyperlinks to the Kremlin, which Durov known as “inaccurate” in an interview in March with the Monetary Occasions, the primary time the reclusive CEO has spoken to the press since 2017.
On Durov’s Instagram, he’s typically photographed bare-chested, displaying off his muscular physique in desert landscapes or posing in infinity swimming pools.
He’s recurrently seen sporting all-black outfits in an obvious nod to the character Neo from the film The Matrix.
Content material on Telegram ricochets across the internet when it’s shared to different social networks, the place it may well typically be topic to the content material moderation guidelines of different platforms. However Durov has lengthy championed Telegram as an anything-goes service, with Durov’s supporters hailing him as a free speech hero.