Among the leaders of the world’s biggest social media sites, Telegram founder Pavel Durov has always been an outsider. Unlike Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he has never appeared on Capitol Hill to apologize for past mistakes. Unlike TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, he’s never signed up for a five-hour grilling by Congress about whether his app is spying on Americans. And unlike X’s Elon Musk, he’s never taken part in an awkward photo opps where he says how much new regulation is “aligned with my thinking.”
Instead, Durov has spent years cultivating Telegram’s image as a proudly anti-authority platform. In practice, that has meant ignoring various governments’ requests to either take down content or hand over the identities of Telegram users suspected of serious crimes. “To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments,” the company still says on its website.
Now, the 39-year-old is facing the consequences of that strategy. On Wednesday evening a Paris prosecutor announced Durov had been indicted on charges including complicity in enabling a range of crimes as well as refusal to communicate information or documents with French authorities.
There was an “almost total lack of response from Telegram to legal requests,” Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in a statement shared with WIRED on Wednesday evening. Durov is facing a wide range of charges, including complicity for allegedly enabling an illicit transaction, drug trafficking, and the spread of sexual images of children on his platform—but Beccuau’s statement focused on Telegram’s unwillingness to work with authorities in both France and Belgium.
“This is what led JUNALCO [the National Jurisdiction for the Fight against Organized Crime] to open an investigation,” she said. Durov has been forbidden from leaving the country and must report to a police station twice a week.
The hashtag #FreePavel has rippled across social media since Saturday, when he was first arrested. Russian state media shared pictures of demonstrators placing paper planes (Telegram’s logo) outside the French embassy in Moscow. “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the abuse of that platform,” said Telegram, when charges were first released. Durov’s lawyer did not reply to WIRED’s request to comment on his indictment.
Durov is the first high-profile victim of a shift in mindset from officials, who are losing patience with the platforms they consider to be roiling domestic politics or fueling crime. “Durov’s arrest comes at a particularly volatile time for online platforms and their users,” Evelyn Austin, director of Dutch digital rights foundation Bits of Freedom, said in a statement.
This is bigger than Telegram. European fines for Big Tech infractions now reach into the billions of dollars. Negotiations continue over new laws that critics say threaten encryption. And the idea that social media platforms are responsible for their users’ criminal actions is growing. A poll in the UK this summer found that two-thirds of respondents agree that companies should be held responsible for hosting content that incites riots, with the same number of respondents feeling the sites are regulated too little. Calls by politicians and judges to suspend access to a range of social media sites after periods of disorder have become almost commonplace: in France last year, amid rioting in response to police violence; in the midst of riots in the French-Pacific territory of New Caledonia; and today in Brazil, where the government threatened to block X as part of a dispute over misinformation.
“[Elon] Musk and fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability,” said Bruce Daisley, a former executive at Twitter who worked at the company’s British office, days after British protesters tried to set fire to a hotel for asylum seekers.
But Telegram has provoked politicians more than any other platform. What could be called the company’s uncollaborative approach has put the platform—part messaging app, part social media network—on a collision course with governments around the world.
The case in France is far from the first time Telegram has been reprimanded by authorities for its refusal to cooperate. Telegram has been temporarily suspended twice in Brazil, in 2022 and 2023, both times after being accused of failing to cooperate with legal orders.
In 2022, similar events unfolded in Germany when the country’s interior minister also threatened to ban the app after letters, suggestions of fines, and even a Telegram-dedicated task force all went unanswered, according to the authorities, who were concerned about anti-lockdown groups using the app to discuss political assassinations. Multiple German newspapers, including the tabloid Bild, sent journalists to the office that Telegram states as its headquarters in Dubai and found it deserted, its doors locked.
Earlier in 2024, Spain briefly blocked Telegram after broadcasters claimed copyrighted material was circulating on the app. Judge Santiago Pedraz of Spain’s National High Court said his decision to ban was based on Telegram’s lack of cooperation with the case.
The accusations in France are very specific to Telegram’s way of working, says Arne Möhle, cofounder of encrypted email service Tuta. “Of course it’s important to be independent, but at the same time, it’s also important to comply with authority requests if they are valid,” he says. “It’s important to show [criminal activities are] something you don’t want to support with your privacy-oriented service.”
France’s decision to charge Durov is a rare move to link a tech executive to crimes taking place on their platform, but it is not without precedent. Durov joins the ranks of the founders of The Pirate Bay, who were sentenced by Swedish authorities to a year in prison in 2009, and the German-born founder of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom, who finally lost a 12-year battle to be extradited to the US from his home in New Zealand in August. He plans to appeal.
Yet Durov is the first of his generation of founders behind major social media platforms to face such severe consequences. What happens next will carry lessons for them all.
Bastien Le Querrec, legal officer at French digital freedom group La Quadrature du Net, does not defend Telegram’s lack of moderation. But he is concerned that the case against Durov reflects the huge pressure both social media and messaging apps are under right now to collaborate with law enforcement.
“[The prosecutor] refers to a provision in French law that requires platforms to disclose any useful document that could allow law enforcement to do interception of communication,” he says. “To our knowledge, it’s the first time that a platform, whatever its size, would be prosecuted [in France] because it refused to disclose such documents. It’s a very worrying precedent.”
