As Maillochon and other French journalists went on to report, prosecutors had been secretly investigating Durov for months over his and Telegramâs alleged failure to block illegal activityâwhich authorities claim included fraud, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), organized crime, and terrorismâon the platform. The French Gendarmerie alone had counted 2,460 cases between 2013 and 2024 in which legal requests made to Telegram had gone unanswered, according to the outlet Libération. Maylis de Roeck, a spokesperson for the prosecutorâs office, told WIRED that when her team realized just how many investigations across different departments were being stymied by Telegramâs lack of response, they decided to issue an arrest warrant. As they saw it, Durovâs silence amounted to complicity.
In the immediate aftermath of the arrest, no one from Telegram commented publicly. One of Durovâs close associates, George Lobushkinâthe former head of PR at VKontakteâtold WIRED: âI am in shock, and everyone close to Pavel feels the same. Nobody was prepared for this situation.â Lobushkin added that he worried âa lotâ about Telegramâs future if Durov remained in custody.
In the US, one of the first to react to the arrest was Tucker Carlson, the right-wing TV host. In a post on X, Carlson called Durov âa living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies.â Elon Musk reposted a clip from Carlsonâs interview and captioned it â#FreePavel.â Even Edward Snowden, a stern critic of Telegramâs security claims, expressed alarm. âI am surprised and deeply saddened that Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means for gaining access to private communications,â he wrote on X. Macron, for his part, issued a statement that France was âdeeply committed to freedom of expression,â adding of the arrest: âIt is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.â
On the Sunday evening after Durovâs arrest, his custody was extended to the 96-hour limit. According to Maillochonâs sources, he slept in a cramped cell, although investigators made the rare concession of letting Durov have a fresh set of clothes delivered. Under further questioning, Durov reportedly claimed he hadnât been unresponsive to takedown requests from law enforcement; police had merely sent their requests to the wrong place. (Durov made a similar claim in 2022 when Brazilâs supreme court temporarily banned Telegram, essentially saying the courtâs legal requests had been lost in the mail.) Durov also said he had been in touch with French intelligence services about terrorism cases.
On August 28, nearly four days after his arrest, Durov was formally indicted on six charges. The most seriousâcomplicity in the administration of an online platform to enable organized crime and illicit transactionsâcarried a maximum penalty of 10 yearsâ imprisonment, as well as a â¬500,000 ($521,000) fine. With bail set at â¬5 million ($5.2 million) and swiftly paid, Durov was released that night but prohibited from leaving the country. He was also ordered to report to a police station twice a week.
The case against Durov, the CEO of a huge mainstream platform, was unprecedented. And it came at a moment when his professed libertarian ideals and laissez-faire attitude to content moderation seemed to be ascendant. The small size of Durovâs team had actually inspired Musk to fire 80 percent of Twitterâs staff when he took it over, according to Character Limit, a book by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Musk gutted the companyâs moderation and trust-and-safety teams. If Durov could run a platform with about 60 full-time employees, most of them in Dubai, why not try something similar? More recently, Mark Zuckerberg fired Metaâs fact-checkers in the US and loosened the enforcement of rules against inflammatory content on the companyâs platforms. The ârecent elections,â Zuckerberg said, were a âcultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.â