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Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, was arrested on Saturday night whereas leaving his non-public jet at France’s Bourget airport, in accordance with French tv community TF1.
Experiences of Durov’s arrest sparked widespread dialogue and hypothesis on social media, together with on Telegram itself, though it appears to be largely primarily based on the identical handful of reviews in French media. Neither Telegram nor a spokesperson for France’s nationwide anti-fraud workplace ONAF instantly responded to a request for remark.
In accordance with TF1, Durov confronted a warrant in France primarily based on a preliminary police investigation. The French authorities reportedly declare that Telegram’s lack of content material moderation and unwillingness to cooperate with regulation enforcement make Durov an confederate to the drug trafficking, cash laundering, and sharing of kid pornography that allegedly happen through the app.
The reported arrest will seemingly gasoline additional debate across the extent to which messaging apps needs to be held accountable (legally and in any other case) for the messages their customers share.
Forbes estimates Durov’s internet price at $15.5 billion. Though born in Russia, he left the nation in 2014 after resisting authorities strain to launch information about Ukrainian protest leaders from his earlier social community Vkontakte. Durov now lives in Dubai, the place Telegram relies, and his aircraft was reportedly flying in from Azerbaijan.
Durov mentioned final month that Telegram had 950 million lively customers, with a purpose of reaching 1 billion this 12 months. On the identical time, the corporate claims to have round solely 30 engineers — a really small group for an app of Telegram’s scale, seemingly making Durov much more essential to the corporate’s operation.
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