Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, is pictured on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015 on September 21, 2015, in San Francisco.
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Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov break his silence eight days after being prosecuted by French authorities.
On his personal Telegram channel, amid shoutouts, hearts and thumbs-up emojis, Durov defiantly dismissed claims that his messaging platform was a “chaos paradise” and criticized the French accusations as “false.”
“If a country is unhappy with an internet service, it is established practice to sue the service itself. Using pre-smartphone law to charge a CEO with crimes committed by a third party on the platform he manages is the wrong approach.”
While the Russian tech billionaire admitted Telegram was “not perfect,” he insisted the company had deleted millions of posts and was busy fixing protocols to make the platform “safer and more robust.”
Telegram has seen strong growth since its founding in 2013. The app now has 950 million users globally. Durov blamed “development difficulties that make it easier for criminals to abuse our platform.”
The 39-year-old French-UAE citizen was indicted in Paris on August 28 on charges including distributing child abuse images, drug trafficking and failure to comply with the law. He was placed on bail of the equivalent of $5.5 million and placed under court supervision. He is also not allowed to leave the country.
In a short Telegram post on Thursday, Durov gave more details about what happened in the days after his arrest in Paris in late August.
“Last month, I was questioned by the police for four days after arriving in Paris. I was told that I could be held personally responsible for other people using Telegram illegally, as the French authorities had not received any response from Telegram.”
Last week, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement outlining widespread allegations that Telegram had been “almost completely unresponsive to the court’s requests.”
Durov denied the allegations and charges, saying in his post:
“Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and responds to EU requests” and “The French authorities have had multiple ways to contact me to request support”.
