Pavel Durov, the Russian-born founder of Telegram, has been detained in France.

Durov, who founded Telegram with his brother, has an estimated net worth of $15 billion. He was born in the Soviet Union and now lives in Dubai. 

 

The detention of Pavel Durov, who is a Russian-born founder and CEO of a popular messaging platform called Telegram, in France, highlights the company and its policies.

Durov established Telegram back in August 2013 with his brother, Nikolai, who designed the technological framework on which the cloud-based messenger works. The company currently states that more than 950 million people worldwide use Telegram. The estimated net worth of Pavel Durov in Forbes is $15 billion.

Well, it's all about Durov, Telegram, and its recent problems.

Who is Pavel Durov?

Born in 1984 in Leningrad—today St. Petersburg, Russia—Durov's family moved to Italy when he was 4, he said in a rare interview to Tucker Carlson this year. Durov did well at school, he said, adding he felt he became part European.

Durov's family moved back to Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed, where his father got an offer to run a department at St. Petersburg State University, he told Carlson. His brother and he were good at math, coding, and design; by college, he had started making websites, said Durov. 

 

Dubbed the "Russian Mark Zuckerberg" after his social network VKontakte or VK, was likened to the Russian version of Facebook following its success, he fell out with the Russian government when it asked him to shut down opposition accounts in 2011 and provide the personal data of Ukrainian pro-democracy protesters in 2014, he said. "I faced a difficult choice," Durov told Carlson and added he could have either caved into the demands or resigned from the company and left Russia. "I chose the latter," he said. 

Durov said he finally moved to Dubai because business was easy to do and that it was a "neutral place" geopolitically. He is reportedly holding dual citizenship of the United Arab Emirates and France, according to Telegram. It is not known whether he gave up his Russian passport.

At the end of July, a message in Durov's official Telegram channel went up, claiming he had become a father to 100 children after donating sperm to a fertility clinic 15 years ago. "The shortage of healthy sperm has become an increasingly serious issue worldwide, and I am proud that I did my part to help alleviate it," the message said.

What is Telegram?

Telegram is a messaging app that allows users to create channels, through which they can broadcast to large audiences. The company has bragged about its encryption and claimed to be faster and more secure than its peers. "On top of that, private messaging on Telegram is free and will stay free — no ads, no subscription fees, forever," Telegram says on its website. 

 

Some experts, however, point to misunderstandings over Telegram's encryption services. "Telegram is often seen as an 'encrypted messenger,' but for many users, it functions a lot more like an unencrypted social network," wrote X John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. According to him, most features on Telegram, including chats and groups, are not end-to-end-encrypted until users opt for the encryption.

Telegram has previously stated that it never revealed any user information to any third parties, which will also include governments.

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When Telegram reached the 500 million monthly active users mark in the year 2020, Durov stated that he was not going to sell the platform, unlike the founders of WhatsApp, and said he would instead now attack ads or other offerings for premium users.

The lightly moderated messaging services within the app have made a place for groups posting content that may be banned by every other major social media network—right-wing groups, organized crime figures, and militant organizations. Even further, it is popular to criminal syndicates and terrorist groups because of its encrypted messaging, which makes monitoring hard to trace by authorities of the law.

Why was Durov detained in France?

 

The Interior and Justice ministries of France could not be reached for comment, and Paris authorities said a statement will be made on Monday regarding Durov's detention.

According to the French newspaper Le Monde, Durov was detained within the framework of a preliminary examination on the lack of content moderation on Telegram and the role of the platform in allowing, according to them, criminal activity. It investigates the failures of Telegram to collaborate with the police regarding child pornography, cyberscams, and organized crime, the newspaper said.

On Sunday, Telegram said the company complies with applicable laws in the European Union and content moderation practices are "industry standard."

"Telegram's CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe," the company said. "It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform."