Pavel Durov says French authorities should have complained to Telegram, not detained him
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Telegram founder Pavel Durov made the comments in a post on his Telegram channel in his first public comments since his August detention.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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PARIS – The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, under investigation in France, said early on Sept 6 that the French authorities should have approached his company with their complaints rather than detaining him.
In his first public statement since his August detention
He said the investigation into the app was surprising in that the French authorities had access to a “hotline” he had helped set up, and they could have contacted Telegram’s European Union representative at any time.
“If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself,” he wrote.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a chief executive with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.”
Telegram, he said, was not perfect, but he denied any abuse associated with the app.
“But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue,” he wrote. “We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day.”
Durov, born in Russia but now a French national, was detained in late August in France amid an investigation into crimes related to child pornography, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions associated with the app. REUTERS
