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 the 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 the 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 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.
