Why was Telegram’s CEO and founder, Pavel Durov, arrested?

If you live in the US, you probably don’t use Telegram, but the social media and messaging platform boasts nearly 1 billion active users worldwide. Its founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, was arrested on Saturday in France. He was born in Russia but holds citizenship in several countries, including France. Why has his arrest created such backlash, with some calling it an attack on free speech? And what does his arrest teach us about internet freedom? 

Who is Pavel Durov, and what is Telegram? 

Pavel Durov founded Vkontakte in 2006, a Russian social media platform inspired by Facebook. According to Durov, Russian authorities pressured him to either release users’ data and censor Putin’s political enemies or lose control of the company and be forced to leave the country. So, he moved to Dubai, ceded control of Vkontakte, and eventually created Telegram in 2013. 

Durov is loudly anti-establishment, and Telegram follows his vision for free, uncensored internet. Telegram is a messaging service, like WhatsApp or iMessage, but it also acts like a social media platform, with group chats growing to as large as 200,000. It’s popular in Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Russia, and India. 

Although Russia initially banned Telegram, it eventually became a staple of Russian communication. Ironically, some are worried about Telegram’s ties to the Russian government despite the country’s rocky past relationship with Durov.

Telegram prides itself on security, offering “end-to-end encryption” for private messages if you turn it on, but other messaging apps, like WhatsApp, already do that. Telegram’s free speech chops are shown because it doesn’t reasonably cooperate with criminal investigations and employs very light content moderation. 

Regardless, Durov’s vocal free-speech and anti-establishment rhetoric, and now arrest, have made him a sort of free-speech folk hero. Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), and Edward Snowden, famous as an NSA whistleblower, recently posted the hashtag “FreePavel.” But why would the French authorities arrest him in the first place? 

Why did French authorities arrest Durov? 

Due to its minimal content moderation policies, the ability to share large files, massive chat sizes, and the promise of security, Telegram has become a beacon of both free speech and illicit activity. In the past, Telegram has removed some content, like child sexual abuse or posts specifically inciting violence. Still, it remains a hub for terrorist propaganda, drug dealing, extremisms, and child pornography. 

Last month, France opened a judicial inquiry into criminal violations, including complicity in “selling child sexual abuse material and in drug trafficking, fraud, abetting organized crime transactions and refusing to share information or documents with investigators when required by law.” Many analysts were frustrated by the French authority’s initial lack of clarity, giving credence to free speech concerns. 

On Wednesday, he was charged with “complicity in crimes such as enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud, and refusing to cooperate with law enforcement.” The New York Times called it a “rare move by legal authorities” to hold a tech executive personally liable for the crimes committed on their platform. According to the indictment, for example, Telegram didn’t cooperate with investigations into child sexual abuse content on its platform. 

On the one hand, Telegram’s response seems reasonable: “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.” On the other hand, it also seems reasonable that if people traffic drugs through your backyard, you have a responsibility to tell the police. 

Telegram, as a messaging app, seems responsible for reporting crime. Of course, the debate about content moderation isn’t that simple, and we won’t be able to resolve it or even look closely at any serious arguments for or against moderating social media in this article. Instead, let’s consider a broader reflection. 

The ultimate and penultimate realities

The world we live in is subject to sin’s dreadful contradictions. Freedom is good and God-given. But restrict people less, and they will abuse their freedom. Restrict people’s freedoms, and the few will oppress the many. 

The German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Ethics that we live in the penultimate world, whereas the kingdom of God is the ultimate. In the penultimate, we live in a broken world that can only shadow the coming glory of a new creation. 

Christians should not abandon God’s wisdom for worldly things (penultimate) nor become perfectionists about everything “right” (ultimate)—nor do we “compromise” between the two positions. Instead, he argues, we must principally look to Christ. Jesus lived perfectly in the penultimate world of sin and contradictions yet attained perfect, ultimate virtue in alignment with God’s will. As such, Jesus must be the center of Christian ethics. 

Whether Telegram should or shouldn’t be more moderated, and whether or not Durov’s arrest is just, we can be sure that unmoderated spaces like Telegram can and will be used for illicit activity. In the same way, we cannot hope for an ethical answer from government moderation. Instead, we must hope for the ultimate. We live as best we can by following the one who lived out the ultimate perfectly in the penultimate world—Jesus. 

So, no matter what we think about this issue of free speech and moderation of criminality, we should look to God’s word and Jesus’ life for ways to live in a broken, contradictory world.