Pavel Durov, the founder of the Telegram messaging app, broke his silence over his arrest in France saying the investigators employed a “misguided approach” and should have reached out to the company with complaints instead.
Mr Durov was arrested in Paris last month over allegations that his app was being used for illicit activity, such as drug trafficking and the distribution of child sexual abuse images.
In his first public comments since being released, Mr Durov on Thursday denied suggestions the platform was an “anarchic paradise”.
He said the investigation into the app was surprising given the French authorities had access to a “hotline” he helped set up and could have used it to contact 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 on the app.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.”
Mr Durov said his platform was not perfect but denied that it was abetting abuse. “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.”
The Russian-born French citizen was taken into custody at the Le Bourget airport on 24 August after landing from Azerbaijan.
In a statement on the platform, Telegram said it followed EU laws and its content moderation was “within industry standards and constantly improving”.
Telegram was launched in 2013 by Mr Durov and his brother Nikolai Durov. The former supported the app “financially and ideologically”, according to Telegram, “while Nikolai’s input is technological”.
Several Western governments have criticised Telegram for a lack of content moderation, which they claim opens up the messaging platform for potential use in money laundering, drug trafficking and the sharing of material linked to the sexual exploitation of minors.
Compared to other messaging apps, Telegram was “more lax in terms of policy and detection of illegal content”, said David Thiel, who has investigated the use of online platforms for child exploitation at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
In addition, Telegram “appears basically unresponsive to law enforcement”, he told the Associated Press, adding that rival messaging app WhatsApp “submitted over 1.3 million CyberTipline reports in 2023 and Telegram submits none”.
CyberTipline is a centralised American reporting system for complaints about the online exploitation of children.
Telegram offers encryption for communications on the app, but this feature is not on by default. Users have to switch on the option to encrypt their chats.
Telegram says it had some 950 million active users in July 2024, making it the world’s fourth most popular messaging platform behind WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger.
Last year, Brazil temporarily suspended Telegram over its failure to surrender data on allegedly neo-Nazi activity related to a police inquiry into school shootings in November.
In 2022, Germany issued fines of $5m (£3.8m) against the operators of Telegram for failing to comply with German law.