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Pavel Durov, the 39-year-old Russian-born billionaire founder and CEO of Telegram, was arrested at Le Bourget airport outdoors Paris late Saturday night. The arrest occurred shortly after Durov arrived on a non-public jet from Azerbaijan and is alleged to be a part of a joint investigation by a number of businesses investigating alleged failures in content material moderation on the Telegram platform that will have facilitated felony exercise.
In accordance with sources who spoke to Reuters, French authorities had noticed Durov on the passenger record and moved to arrest him resulting from an present warrant. A number of French TV reviews stated that authorities have been investigating Telegram’s alleged moderation failures, which they consider could have facilitated a spread of unlawful actions, together with terrorism, drug trafficking, cash laundering, fraud, and youngster exploitation.
Telegram, which is predicated in Dubai, responded to Durov’s arrest by stating that the corporate “abides by EU legal guidelines, together with the Digital Companies Act” and that its moderation practices are “inside trade requirements and consistently bettering.” The corporate emphasised that Durov “has nothing to cover and travels ceaselessly in Europe,” calling it “absurd to assert {that a} platform or its proprietor are accountable for abuse of that platform.”
The arrest has drawn criticism from numerous quarters, together with X (Twitter) proprietor Elon Musk, who has posted the hashtag “#FreePavel” on the platform, and has beforehand claimed that free speech is underneath assault in Europe. Russian officers have additionally expressed their concern, with the overseas ministry demanding consular entry to Durov, who holds twin French and UAE citizenship.
Durov, sometimes called the “Russian Mark Zuckerberg,” based Telegram in 2013 after leaving Russia resulting from conflicts with authorities over his refusal to close down opposition communities on his earlier social media platform, VK. In 2018, Russia started blocking Telegram after the app refused to grant state safety companies entry to customers’ messages, however the ban was lifted in 2020 when Telegram agreed to assist with “extremism investigations.” Telegram has since grown to almost 1 billion customers and has grow to be an important communication device, notably in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in 2022.
The Telegram chief’s arrest has additionally put Telegram’s encryption practices underneath the highlight once more. Regardless of being extensively described as an “encrypted messaging app,” Telegram’s default settings for many customers don’t present end-to-end encryption. Not like WhatsApp and Sign, one-on-one chats should not encrypted by default, and group chats are by no means encrypted. Which means that Telegram employees probably have entry to each message despatched in these chats, which can be why Russia is so involved concerning the arrest.
For customers in search of true end-to-end encryption on Telegram, it should be manually configured as a “secret chat,” a course of that’s not all that easy. Not solely that, these “secret” group chats are restricted to solely two customers, which raises questions concerning the platform’s efforts to guard person privateness.
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