Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov, already in legal trouble in France, is reportedly facing a new headache after European Union regulators launched an investigation into whether his messaging app circumvented digital regulations.
EU legal and data experts suspect Telegram misreported that its platform had fewer than 45 million users, a threshold below which large online platforms are subject to stricter regulation over their influence. The Financial Times reported. Thursday.
Telegram, which has about 1 billion users worldwide, reported 41 million users in the EU in February but did not release updated figures that were due to be released this month.
Earlier this year, Durov told the FT that Telgram's user base was “roughly proportional to the population of each market.” [or] It is the “world's largest” continent, excluding China.
Two EU officials told the FT that Telegram's failure to provide up-to-date data about its user base breaches the Digital Services Act, a law enacted last year to regulate big tech companies including Meta, Google, Amazon and TikTok.
Passing the 45 million user threshold would trigger a series of restrictions demanded by Brussels, including a ban on targeted advertising, measures to stop the spread of misinformation and propaganda, and a mechanism for sharing data with the European Commission, the EU's executive arm responsible for enforcing the law.
“We have ways of determining, through our own systems and calculations, how accurate user data is,” Thomas Regnier, the European Commission's digital affairs spokesman, told the Financial Times.
“If we believe you are not providing accurate user data, we can unilaterally specify [as a very large platform] Based on our own research.”
The Post has reached out to The Telegram for comment.
Newly discovered video showed Durov leaving a French detention centre after appearing in court near Paris on Thursday.
He was detained at Le Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday as part of a major investigation launched this year and released on Wednesday after four days of questioning.
An investigating judge laid preliminary charges against him on Wednesday night and later released him on $5.6 million bail. He was ordered to remain in the country and report to a police station twice a week, according to a statement from the Paris prosecutor's office.
The accusations against Durov, who is also a French national, include that his platform was being used to transport child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, and that Telegram refused to share information and documents with investigators despite being required by law to do so.
According to prosecutors, the first preliminary charge against him is “conspiracy to operate an online platform to enable illegal transactions by an organized group,” which could carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of more than $500,000.
A preliminary charge under French law means a judge has sufficient grounds to believe a crime has been committed but allows more time for further investigation.
French media quoted Durov's lawyer, David-Olivier Kaminski, as saying: “It is completely absurd to think that the head of a social network is directly or indirectly involved in criminal activity that does not concern him.”
Prosecutors said Durov was “currently the only person implicated in the case.”
He did not deny the possibility that there may be other people under investigation, but declined to comment on the possibility of other arrest warrants.
