“[Elon] Musk and his fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability,” said Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter executive who worked in the company’s UK office, days after British protesters tried to set fire to an asylum seekers’ hotel.
But Telegram has provoked politicians more than any other platform. What you might call the company’s non-collaborative approach has put the platform — part messaging app, part social media network — on a collision course with governments around the world.
The case in France is far from the first time that Telegram has been reprimanded by authorities for refusing to cooperate. Telegram has been temporarily suspended in Brazil twice, in 2022 and 2023, both times after it was accused of failing to comply with court orders.
Similar events unfolded in Germany in 2022, when the country’s interior minister threatened to ban the app after letters, suggested fines and even a special Telegram task force all went unanswered, according to authorities concerned that anti-lockdown groups were using the app to discuss political assassinations. Several German newspapers, including tabloid Bild, sent journalists to the office Telegram lists as its headquarters in Dubai and found it deserted, with the doors locked.
Earlier in 2024, Spain briefly blocked Telegram after broadcasters alleged copyrighted material was circulating on the app. Judge Santiago Pedraz of Spain’s national supreme court said his decision to ban Telegram was based on Telegram’s lack of cooperation in the case.
The allegations in France are very specific to Telegram's way of working, says Arne Möhle, co-founder of the encrypted email service Tuta. “Of course it is important to be independent, but at the same time it is also important to comply with requests from authorities if they are valid,” he says. “It is important to show [criminal activities are] something you don't want to support with your privacy-focused service.”
France’s decision to charge Durov is a rare move to link a tech executive to crimes committed on its platform, but it is not without precedent. Durov joins the founders of The Pirate Bay, who were sentenced to a year in prison by Swedish authorities in 2009, and German-born Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who in August finally lost a 12-year battle to be extradited from his home in New Zealand to the US. He plans to appeal.
Yet Durov is the first of his generation of founders behind major social media platforms to face such serious consequences. What happens now will have lessons for all of them.
Bastien Le Querrec, a legal officer at French digital freedom group La Quadrature du Net, doesn’t defend Telegram’s lack of moderation. But he worries that Durov’s case reflects the enormous pressure both social media and messaging apps are currently under to cooperate with law enforcement.
“[The prosecutor] refers to a provision in French law that requires platforms to make public any usable document that would allow law enforcement to intercept communications,” he says. “To our knowledge, this is the first time that a platform, regardless of its size, has been prosecuted [in France] because it refused to release such documents. It is a very worrying precedent.”
