Earlier this week, Pavel Durov - CEO of Telegram published an interview with Tucker Carlson where he gave his account of his arrest in August of 2024.

For those of you that don’t know Telegram, its a messaging app with over 1B active monthly users, competing with the user bases of big tech apps like Meta.

Telegram has claimed in their privacy policy up until 2023, that they’ve never sent a ‘byte’ of user’s info to third party or law enforcement.

Maybe that’s why he got arrested?

Pavel claims that he was only visiting France for touristic purposes, at the time - we were speculating that Pavel was baited to visit France by Macron himself.

When arriving at the airport he was presented with a list of charges, everything from organized crime, publishing child abuse material, and drug trafficking - all things that occur on the dark corners of the messaging app.

Rather than go through the appropriate channels, French investigators were sending reports directly to Telegram instead of their law firms that managed the lawful requests. Telegram is notorious for having a main office in Dubai where no one actually works, and doesn’t bother responding to mail-ins.

After no response to their requests, they decided to take Pavel into custody the next time he visited. In fact - Pavel is still somewhat in custody, unable to leave the country and under regular supervision.

Pavel claims that Telegram has historically always complied with all lawful data requests, under the Digital Services Act. Since Telegram has 1B active users, they fall under the ‘very large platforms’ which have the most obligation to report criminal offenses.

Pavel shares that they have always provided IP addresses and phone numbers of the subjects of any lawful requests, but because French authorities did not follow EU laws - Telegram didn’t properly receive those requests.

Although I don’t think this is the whole truth - this story could be plausible. You can’t be ontop of everything in a billion user enterprise, and if French authorities were sending mail to a black-hole and geting frustrated - of course they’d resort to arrest.

One thing bothered me about the interview. We do need ask Pavel some hard questions. One - why do you have to pay for the ability to prevent spammers from contacting you? Yes - that’s right, you need to pay for Telegram premium to prevent unknown people from sending you messages. 99% of the time - these are scammers preying on people. And most of the spammers use Telegram premium to improve their deliverability. Is Telegram making money of scammers and their victims?

On one hand, I am thankful that Telegram kept a place for dissident voices while most platforms were censoring over the past 4 years. On the other hand, we should demand more from a company that supposedly champions their user’s privacy and freedom.

Links:

https://www.businessinsider.com/telegram-pavel-durov-travel-restrictions-france-arrest-charges-2025-6

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