Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov says arrest “misguided”

Washington DC [US], September 6 (ANI): In his first statement following his arrest in France, Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov on Friday stated that it was a “misguided approach” to hold him personally responsible for the spread of illicit content on the social media platform.

The Russian-born Durov was arrested in France last week and was charged for allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app.

On Friday, Durov took to his Telegram channel to post that “he is still trying to understand what happened in France.”

Durov said that the French authorities should have first approached his companies with their complaints instead of arresting him over the matter.

The 39-year-old billionaire has been charged with crimes on Telegram included the spread of child sexual abuse material, fraud and drug sales, according to French prosecutors.

“No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools,” Durov wrote on the messaging app as reported by the New York Times.

Durvo 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,” the Telegram co-founder said as per the NYT report.

While French prosecutors said Durov was arrested in part because of Telegram’s “almost total lack of response” to requests related to criminal investigations, Durov himself has said that it was “a surprise” for him.

Further, he dismissed as unfounded the perception that Telegram is an “anarchic paradise” stating that he takes down millions of harmful posts a day.

Defending his app, Durov said that Telegram would announce further changes to address the abuse of the messaging app “very soon.”

“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 in his post on the app as cited by the NYT.

The American news daily cited Durov’s message in which he said that France was using laws from the “pre-smartphone era” to charge him with crimes by Telegram’s users. It would be more appropriate to bring legal action against his company, not him personally, he said.

Durov noted that operating a global communications platform is a tricky balance between privacy and security adding that in Russia and Iran, the messaging company has been willing to be banned rather than cede to government demands.