Pavel Durov, the founder of the online communications tool Telegram, said on Thursday that it was a “misguided approach” to hold him personally responsible for the spread of illicit content on the platform.
Mr. Durov’s comments, made on his Telegram account, were his first public remarks since he was arrested at an airport outside Paris and charged last month by the French authorities for failing to prevent illegal activity on the app. The crimes on Telegram included the spread of child sexual abuse material, fraud and drug sales, French prosecutors have said.
“No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools,” Mr. Durov wrote. He said “growing pains” on Telegram, which has 950 million users, had made it easy for criminals to abuse the platform.
“That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard,” he said.
Mr. Durov’s case has become a point of contention in the politically charged debate over the limits of free speech on the internet. Telegram is committed to light supervision of what people say or do on the platform. The app has helped people living under authoritarian governments communicate and organize. But it has also become a hothouse for disinformation, extremism and other harmful content.
Telegram has long been in the cross hairs of global law enforcement agencies because it has refused to cooperate with the authorities. French prosecutors said Mr. Durov had been arrested in part because of Telegram’s “almost total lack of response” to requests related to criminal investigations.
“This was a surprise to me,” Mr. Durov said in his Telegram comments.
Telegram, he said, has an official representative in the European Union with a public email address that is discoverable through a Google search. He added that he is a French citizen and a “frequent guest” at the French Consulate in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where he now lives. He said he had “personally helped” the French authorities “establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.”
Mr. Durov said France was using laws from the “pre-smartphone era” to charge him with crimes committed by Telegram’s users. It would be more appropriate to bring legal action against his company, not him personally, he said.
Operating a global communications platform is a tricky balance between privacy and security, he noted. In Russia and Iran, he said, the company has been willing to be banned rather than cede to government demands.
Telegram is not perfect, Mr. Durov said, but he called the perception that it is an “anarchic paradise” unfounded. The platform takes down millions of harmful posts a day, he said.
The company would announce further changes to address the abuse of Telegram “very soon,” Mr. Durov added.
“We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated,” he said.
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