Telegram’s Pavel Durov Held in France for Alleged Distribution of Child Sex Abuse Material

The Washington Post / Pranshu Verma, Joseph Menn, Niha Masih

15:47 JST, August 27, 2024

French authorities said Monday that they had arrested Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov in a probe of illegal child abuse activity on the messaging app, taking the most dramatic action to date in the global fight between officials and tech companies over limits to harmful content.

Durov was being temporarily detained in connection with distributing child sex abuse material and drugs, money laundering and working with organized crime, according to a statement released by French prosecutor Laure Beccuau.

The accusations also included improper use of cryptography and failure to allow authorized law enforcement interception, flash points in the efforts by some governments to force companies to reveal private messages between users. The prosecutor’s statement said the probe is of an unnamed person, allowing for the possibility that Durov is not the ultimate target.

Durov’s arrest reignites a fierce debate pitting free-speech advocates, including X owner Elon Musk, against governmental efforts to police the role of social media and messaging platforms in spreading illegal and false information. It also casts a fresh spotlight on Telegram, which online experts said has created a uniquely ripe environment for harmful activity, even as X and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have drawn similar scrutiny.

The action against Durov, a Russian-born billionaire who lives in Dubai and was detained over the weekend at the Bourget airport outside Paris after arriving from Azerbaijan in his private jet, also renews debate over whether tech companies should be held liable for the content that flourishes on their platforms. (Durov is a dual citizen of the United Arab Emirates and France, according to his company.)

U.S. law, like that of France, does not protect platforms from prosecution over knowingly permitting transmission of sex abuse or terrorist material, said Daphne Keller of Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.

Former Facebook anti-terror chief Brian Fishman said on Threads that the issue was not just insufficient moderation, a criticism many platforms have faced. Telegram, he wrote, “has been the key hub for ISIS for a decade. It tolerates [child sexual abuse material]. It’s ignored reasonable [law-enforcement] engagement for YEARS. It’s not ‘light’ content moderation; it’s a different approach entirely.”

Others saw a slippery slope in the action against Durov.

“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 Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology.

Telegram did not respond Monday to a request for comment. On Sunday, it said on X: “Telegram abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act – its moderation is within industry standards and constantly improving. Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe.”

Telegram is one of the most popular messaging apps globally, with more than 950 million users. Law enforcement agencies across the globe have long focused on the app because it has become a tool of choice for child predators, terrorist organizations, narcotics traffickers and far-right extremists for communicating and organizing their activities. The app allows for private group chats and messaging, a feature cyber experts say creates an ideal environment for illegal activity.

National governments have barred the app or requested that it takes down content for its role in inciting hateful activity and spreading illegal content. Brazil temporarily banned Telegram in 2023 amid investigations into neo-Nazi groups that allegedly used the app to conduct school attacks.

That same year, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology requested that the site take down all child sexual abuse imagery. The European Union has started to enforce broader laws governing social networks and meting out consequences for breaching them.

Russia’s relationship with Telegram has been fraught. Durov left the country in 2014 after he was pressured to turn over information about users of his social networking company VKontakte, which he instead sold to Kremlin-friendly investors.

Russia and its allies have made extensive use of Telegram to spread views, recruit spies and give directions to troops. Ukraine has done so as well.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the same time as Durov but did not meet him, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. The presence of the two men in the Azerbaijani capital led to speculation that Durov had sought protection from Putin in France – or that France was seeking encryption codes for intelligence purposes.

Durov’s detention has been met by outcry among Russia’s political elite. Margarita Simonyan, a Kremlin propagandist who serves as editor in chief of the RT news channel, called on Russian officials and those who used the Telegram app for “sensitive” messages to “immediately” delete their messages “because Durov has been detained in order to take the [encryption] keys,” she wrote in a post on Telegram.

Russian newspapers were flooded with stories about his arrest. One, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, said his arrest “threatens to become a blow to Russia.”

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 it.

“France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship,” Macron said in a post on X. “It will remain so.”

Telegram’s terms of service say it does not allow users to post pornographic content on public channels but also states that it does not moderate private messages between users or group chats that are not public. The company states it does not comply with official requests for data. “To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments,” it said on its website.

Experts said Durov’s Telegram flouted the laws on child abuse and other issues in many jurisdictions.

Alex Stamos, former director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, said his team there 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 [child sex abuse material] on private channels, many of which are not end-to-end encrypted.” Stamos is now chief information security officer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne.

A June report from the Stanford Internet Observatory found that Telegram was the only major platform not to forbid illegal material in private channels and chats. “Telegram has also been observed by SIO as failing to perform even basic content enforcement on public channels, with instances of known CSAM being detected and reported by our ingest systems,” the report said.

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 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.

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, 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.”