By William J. Furney
Enigmatic Telegram founder Pavel Durov is attempting to curry favour with the unimpressed French authorities by launching a raft of new features on his controversial messaging app.
Russia-born Durov, 39, was arrested on August 24 after flying into Paris on his private jet and charged with hosting illegal content on Telegram as well as allowing extremist content to proliferate on the encrypted app.
Prosecutors say Telegram is used as a platform to sell drugs, guns and stolen credit cards, and that child pornography is also rife on the platform. And they say Telegram has taken no action against illegal activities despite repeated requests from the French authorities.
Pavel, who also holds French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was released on bail of €5 million ($5.5 million) and shortly after hit out at his arrest as “surprising”.
“Last month I got interviewed by police for four days after arriving in Paris,” Pavel wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday. “I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.”
Pavel, who claims to have fathered 100 children and is said to be worth more than $9 billion, said Telegram responds to requests about its content in the European Union as it has “an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests” as well as a publicly available email address.
He said he had taken an active role in Dubai, where he lives, in helping the French authorities with their counterterrorism efforts.
“As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai,” Pavel said. “A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.”
Telegram is one of the most popular messaging apps, along with WhatsApp and Facebook’s Messenger, and has around 800 million monthly active users, according to tracking service Statista. In a subsequent post on X on Friday, Durov said his app now had 10 million paid subscribers, who get access to such features as unlimited cloud storage, voice-to-text generation and faster download speeds. The cost is around $5 per month, depending on users’ location.
Among the Telegram changes Pavel revealed was an end to its People Nearby feature, which he said was barely used — “by less than 0.1% of Telegram users, but had issues with bots and scammers”.
Instead, a new Business Nearby tool would take its place. It would, said Pavel, only be available to “legitimate, verified businesses. These businesses will be able to display product catalogues and accept payments seamlessly.”
He said new media uploads had been “misused by anonymous actors” and had now been disabled. And he said that “[w]hile 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our almost billion users at risk.”
As part of his bail conditions, Pavel was ordered to remain in France and report to local police twice a week.
* Image credit: PA/File