“[Elon] “Musk and his colleagues should be reminded of their criminal liability” he said Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter executive who worked in the company’s UK office, days after the British protests tried to set fire to a hotel for asylum seekers.
But Telegram has provoked politicians more than any other platform. What you might call the company’s uncooperative approach has put the platform—part messaging app, part social network—on a collision course with governments around the world.
The case in France is not the first time Telegram has been reprimanded by authorities for refusing to cooperate. Telegram has been temporarily suspended twice in Brazil, 2022 AND 2023in both cases after being accused of failing to cooperate with the judicial authorities.
In 2022, similar events took place in Germany, when the country’s interior minister also threatened to ban the app after letters, suggestions for fines, and even the creation of a special Telegram task force went unanswered, according to authorities who feared anti-lockdown groups would operate the app to discuss political assassinations. Many German newspapers, including Bild tabloidsent journalists to the office that Telegram says is its headquarters in Dubai but found it deserted and locked.
Earlier in 2024 Spain short blocked Telegram after broadcasters claimed copyrighted material was circulating on the app. Judge Santiago Pedraz of Spain’s Supreme Court said his decision to block it was based on Telegram’s lack of cooperation in the case.
The accusations in France are very specific to Telegram’s modus operandi, says Arne Möhle, co-founder of the encrypted email service Tuta. “Of course it’s critical to be independent, but at the same time it’s also critical to comply with the authorities’ requests if they are justified,” he says. “It’s critical to show that [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 that links a tech executive to crimes committed on its platform, but it is not unprecedented. Durov joins the ranks of The Pirate Bay’s founders, who were sentenced to a year in prison by Swedish authorities in 2009; and the German-born founder of MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom, who lost a 12-year fight to be extradited to the U.S. from his home in New Zealand in August. He plans refer.
But Durov is the first in a generation of founders of major social media platforms to face such serious consequences. What happens next will be a lesson for all of them.
“When Meta and GOOG [Google] They get legal subpoenas, they respond. They reject the junk ones, too. It’s a professional give and take,” Brian Fishman, former director of counterterrorism policy at Facebook, he said on Threads before Durov was formally charged. He claimed that Telegram generally doesn’t do that.
“Should we be looking for a dangerous precedent here? Yes. But we should also acknowledge how brazenly Telegram flouts the norms adopted by almost everyone else.”