Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has called his arrest by the French authorities a misguided approach. In a first public statement released by Durov since his arrest 12-days ago, he criticised the French government’s move. He said when a country has issues with an Internet service, the regular way to deal with it is to initiate legal action against the service itself.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach,” said Durov in a statement. He added that building technology is an uphill task. If innovators will be held personally liable for potential abuse of tools innovated by them, it would demotivate them to create something new.
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“...the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day,” said the CEO in his statement.
Why was Pavel Durov arrested?
The 39-year-old founder of Telegram, Durov, was arrested by the French police on August 25. He was accused of acting irresponsible at a time when his social media platform was used to carry out organised crime. The authorities alleged that Telegram was being used for sharing abusive content, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, and aiding terrorism.
According to AFP, Durov’s arrest order was issued by OFMIN, a French government body that seeks to prevent violence against minors.
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Who is Pavel Durov?
Russian-born Durov is a co-founder of the social media app Telegram. The app is quite amongst the social media platforms and has nearly 900 million users worldwide.
He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with the Russian government’s request to remove opposition groups on VKontakte. VKontakte is a Russian-based social media platform founded by him. Following this, he settled in Dubai.
