Telegram CEO says he will better moderate his behavior after arrest in France

❤️ Thank you all for your support and love!

Last month, I was questioned by the police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told that I could be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, as the French authorities did not receive a response from Telegram.

This was surprising for several reasons:

1. Telegram has an official representative in the EU who accepts and responds to EU requests. Their email address is publicly available to anyone residing in the EU who googles “Telegram EU address for law enforcement.”

2. The French authorities had many ways to reach me for help. As a French citizen, I was often invited to the French consulate in Dubai. Some time ago, when I was asked to do so, I personally helped the authorities set up a hotline with Telegram to deal with the terrorist threat in France.

3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the standard practice is to sue the service itself. Using pre-smartphone laws to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he runs is a misguided approach. Creating technology is hard enough. No innovator will ever create new tools if they know they can be held personally liable for any abuse of those tools.

Finding the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You have to balance privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with EU laws. You also have to consider technological limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent globally, while ensuring they are not misused in countries with weak rule of law. We are committed to working with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles: our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes. But we have always been open to dialogue.

Sometimes we can’t agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. In those cases, we’re willing to leave that country. We’ve done this many times. When Russia asked us to hand over “encryption keys” to enable surveillance, we refused – and Telegram was banned in Russia. When Iran asked us to block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused – and Telegram was banned in Iran. We’re willing to leave markets that aren’t consistent with our principles, because we’re not in this for the money. We’re motivated by a desire to do good and to defend people’s fundamental rights, especially in places where those rights are being violated.

All this doesn’t mean that Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities can be confused about where to send requests is something we should improve. But the claims of some media outlets that Telegram is some kind of lawless paradise are absolutely false. We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this one or this one ). We have hotlines with NGOs to handle urgent moderation requests faster.

However, we hear voices that say this is not enough. The sudden increase in Telegram users to 950 million has caused growing pains that have made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I’ve made it my personal goal to make sure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started this process internally, and I’ll share more details about our progress very soon.

I hope the events of August will result in Telegram — and the social media industry as a whole — being safer and stronger. Thanks again for your love and memes 🙏