The arrest of “Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg” rattles social media

Soon after his private jet touched down on August 24th at Le Bourget airport, on the outskirts of Paris, Pavel Durov was arrested by French police. A statement later released by prosecutors said that the 39-year-old billionaire had been detained as part of an investigation into Telegram, the social-media app of which he is the founder and chief executive. French judges have until August 28th to decide whether to pursue charges or release him.

The limited details released about the case have fanned speculation about the reason for Mr Durov’s detention. Elon Musk, the libertarian owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), framed it as part a worldwide battle over free speech, posting that in Europe people will soon be “executed for liking a meme”. Others saw geopolitical motives, noting Telegram’s role in Russia’s war against Ukraine, both as a disseminator of information and a military communication tool. When Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, took to X to insist that Mr Durov’s detention was “in no way a political decision”, conspiracy theories only proliferated.

Mr Durov—who has been dubbed Russia’s answer to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook—left Russia ten years ago, complaining that he had been forced to sell his first social network, the Facebook-ish VKontakte, to Kremlin-friendly investors. He now lives in Dubai and has citizenship of the United Arab Emirates, France, St Kitts and Nevis, as well as his native Russia. Until recently he seldom spoke to the media, preferring to communicate through the medium of topless selfies on Instagram. Forbes, a magazine, estimates his net worth at $15.5bn.

Telegram, which Mr Durov founded 11 years ago, is a small player in much of the West. But worldwide it is the eighth-largest social-media platform, claiming 900m monthly users, making it 50% bigger than X. Three-quarters of internet users in Russia have it. Telegram does not make money yet, but hopes to within the next year or so, after introducing advertising in 2021. Although often described as a messaging app, its “channels” with thousands of members make it a formidable broadcast platform. It occupies a “unique niche” in Russian media, says Gregory Asmolov of King’s College London, who says it is the only place where Russians can get news (both real and fake) about Ukraine.

Mr Durov is thus idolised by some free-speech advocates, who fear that the internet is increasingly targeted by censors. Their fears are not unfounded. On August 27th Mr Zuckerberg revealed that in 2021 the American government “repeatedly pressured” his company to remove content related to covid-19, including humour and satire. The European Commission is investigating X for allegedly not complying with its rules on misinformation, and in Britain there are calls for stricter laws on the spread of malicious content after riots in the country.

But Telegram’s hands-off approach to moderation has allowed content to flourish that is straightforwardly illegal. A report last year by Stanford University’s Internet Observatory identified large groups sharing child sexual-abuse material (CSAM) on the platform. French prosecutors say Telegram’s failure to stop the spread of such content is one reason for Mr Durov’s arrest. Child exploitation is one area where there is little argument about free speech. “In practice, I do not think that the rules concerning CSAM are meaningfully different across Europe, the UK or the United States,” says David Kaye, a former UN rapporteur on online speech now at the University of California, Irvine.

Although illegal material exists on every platform, Telegram seems to do little to remove it. “All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them,” its website states. It reportedly has a staff of around 50; Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has about 40,000 people in its safety and security teams alone.

French prosecutors also suspect Telegram of breaking rules related to encryption. It is not yet clear if they suspect a minor, technical infringement, or if they have a more fundamental objection to encryption—a principle that the internet industry has vigorously defended. If the objection were fundamental, it would be concerning. And Telegram would make an odd target. The platform may bill itself as “more secure than mass market messengers like WhatsApp”, but the reverse is true. Most messages on Telegram are not end-to-end encrypted, meaning that they are visible to the company—and thus to any government that successfully orders it to hand them over.

Telegram says it has never handed over information to any government. But recently Russia has discovered the identities of previously anonymous Telegram users, leading to prosecutions. Vladimir Putin is not the only one that might be interested in what happens on the platform. Even though Telegram is not very secure, it is used operationally by the Russian military, which is short of alternatives, says Mr Asmolov of King’s College. Mr Durov has encouraged speculation that the American government might be interested in what happens on his platform. In April he gave a rare interview to Tucker Carlson, a right-wing American journalist, in which he complained of receiving “too much attention from the FBI”, which he said had tried to recruit one of his engineers to install a back door into Telegram.

Whatever the reason for Mr Durov’s detention, it is likely to be cited in future by governments seeking to defend their own crackdowns on social-media platforms, justified or not. Countries such as Turkey have demanded that social networks have local executives based in-country, in what some have called “hostage laws”. On August 17th X said that it would close its office in Brazil, after a judge there threatened an executive with arrest if the company did not comply with an order to take down content that the Brazilian courts considered misinformation and hate speech. The incident at Le Bourget airport is likely to have a lasting impact. 

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