Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France after landing at Le Bourget airport in a private jet on Saturday, French media reported.
Durov was arrested on a warrant related to “various violations of encrypted messaging services,” it said. Report by Le MondeThe 39-year-old, who gained French citizenship in 2021, is due to appear in court on Sunday.
French authorities have accused Durov of a “lack of moderation” regarding Telegram, the messaging app that has reportedly come under attack in Europe for “spreading disinformation.”
“As the European Union and the United States pressure major platforms to remove illegal content, Telegram has protected itself from national moderation regulations.” Le Monde Reported.
France’s Office for Combating Violence Against Minors (OFMIN) issued the warrant as part of an investigation into “a range of crimes, including fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime, glorifying terrorism and fraud,” sources told the French newspaper.
“We’ve had enough of Telegram’s impunity,” the French investigator said.
Durov, who doesn’t often give interviews, spoke with Tucker Carlson in April and said he was the first organization to ask the Russian government to censor speech through his other platform, VK, in order to quell protests in the country.
“We were asked to ban these [protest organizing] “I refused despite opposition from the community,” Durov explained, “but negotiations with the government were unsuccessful.”
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“A few years later, in 2013, a similar situation occurred in Ukraine, where people again organized on VK and took to the city’s central squares to express their opposition to the government,” Durov continued.
“The Russian side asked us to hand over the personal information of the organizers of these protests, and our response was: wait a minute, this is a foreign country and we’re not going to betray our Ukrainian users just because you asked us to. We decided to refuse, which didn’t end well for the Russian government,” he added.
As a result, Durov chose to step down as CEO of VK.
“I had to make a difficult decision,” he said, “because I was basically presented with two second-best options: either I did what my national leaders told me to do, or I sold my stake in the company, retired, stepped down as CEO and left the country. I chose the latter.”
Responding to Durov’s arrest in a Saturday X post, Carlson wrote, “In the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing his people freedom of speech. It was the Western countries, allies of the Biden administration and enthusiastic NATO members, who locked him up.”
Pavel Durov left Russia because the government tried to control his social media company Telegram. But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing freedom of speech to its citizens. It was the Western countries, allies of the Biden administration and enthusiastic NATO members… https://t.co/F83E9GbNHC
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 24, 2024
“Pavel Durov sits tonight in a French prison. This is a living warning to platform owners who refuse to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intelligence agencies,” Karlsson added. “Darkness is fast falling on a once free world.”
Elon Musk also responded to the arrest, calling it a “very compelling” display of the First Amendment.
Check out this ad about the First Amendment. It’s very persuasive.
https://t.co/mb4UCSZcgR— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2024
Alana Mastangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her at Facebook And X is Followetc. Instagram.
