The encrypted messaging app Telegram has caused a lot of backlash because of the freedom it offers its users. Its founder and head, the Russian-born Pavel Durov, was arrested last Saturday night in France for various violations the platform has fallen into.
Telegram, created in 2013, has nearly 900 million users and is expected to surpass the one billion monthly active user mark next year, Durov said in an April interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson.
People appreciate the platform’s “independence, respect for privacy and freedom,” he added.
Telegram is at odds with its American rivals, WhatsApp and its more than 2 billion users worldwide, or Messenger, which faces criticism for commercializing its users’ personal data.
In Russia news channels are more popular than traditional media. Some users have hundreds of thousands of followers, such as Ukraine’s DeepState and Russia’s Rybar, which partly explains Telegram’s success after the start of the war in 2022.
For Stephanie Liu, a privacy specialist at the Forrester Institute, Telegram is “the least secure” app because the user has to “manually enable” the encryption system.
“It’s also a platform that’s heavily used for illegal activities,” observed Damien Bankal, cybersecurity expert and blogger at Zataz. Hackers can for example sell stolen data there.
As Telegram chat groups can have up to 200,000 people, the platform has also been criticized for spreading fake news, hate, conspiracy, terrorism, pro-Nazi and even pedophilia content.
Durov said in an interview with the Financial Times in March that he plans to improve Telegram’s control mechanism next year, mainly thanks to artificial intelligence. But “if they don’t cross red lines, I don’t think we should be policing how people express themselves,” he added.
With a fortune of $15.5 billion – 120th in the world – according to Forbes, 39-year-old Durov rose to fame in 2006.
That year he graduated from St. Petersburg University and created with his brother Nikolai the social networking site VKontakte (VK), which quickly became the most popular in Russia, ahead of Facebook.
His success caused friction both with shareholders until 2014, when Durov sold VK, and with the authorities. He eventually fled Russia when he refused to reveal to the security services the personal data of Ukrainian pro-European activists.
He has even explained that the idea to create an encrypted messaging platform was born after the pressure he received in Russia.
After creating Telegram he tried to establish himself in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco. Finally in 2017, Durov chose Dubai for its favorable business environment and “neutrality”, at a time when the EU and US were beginning to exert pressure on social media.
Durov received citizenship of St. Kitts and Nevis, an island in the Caribbean, and in 2021 French.
In France, the judiciary accuses Telegram of not acting to prevent its users from exploiting the platform for illegal activities, such as fraud, drug trafficking, online harassment, organized crime and even the glorification of terrorism. And this is mainly due to a lack of regulatory rules and cooperation with the authorities.
Durov was arrested last night at Bourges airport in northern Paris and is expected to appear in court today.
Many countries have tried to block Telegram: Iran and Russia for supporting violent opposition groups, Brazil in 2023 for not disclosing to the authorities details of neo-Nazi groups, Spain in March for violating intellectual property rights.
Telegram was fully funded by Durov until 2018. The platform, which has about 50 full-time employees, opened up to ads in 2021, but emphasized that it will not use its users’ personal data. In 2022, it created a premium subscription system.
Durov assured the Financial Times that his business has “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenue, while he did not rule out the possibility of going public.
In March, the platform implemented a revenue sharing system with content creators.
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