Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has broken his silence eight days after being indicted by French authorities, describing the accusations against him as “misguided.”
On his personal Telegram channel, amid thank-yous, hearts and thumbs-up emojis, Durov rejected claims that the messaging platform was an “anarchic paradise” and slammed the French accusations as “misguided”:
“When a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to take legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to accuse a CEO of wrongdoings committed by third parties on the platform he runs is misguided.”
The Russian-born tech billionaire acknowledged that Telegram was “not perfect” but noted that the company had removed millions of posts and was busy fixing protocols to make the platform “more reliable and more powerful”.
Telegram has seen explosive growth since its founding in 2013. It now has 950 million global users. Durov blamed the growth pains on “making it easier for criminals to exploit the platform.”
In a brief Telegram post on Thursday, Durov added details about what happened in the days after he was arrested in Paris in late August.
“When I arrived in Paris last month, I was questioned by the police for four days. I was told that I could be personally liable for the illegal use of Telegram by others because the French authorities did not respond to Telegram.”
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau outlined the sweeping allegations last week, saying Telegram had “completely failed to respond to judicial requests.”
Hibya News Agency
