DBT Bureau
Bengaluru, 25 August 2024
Pavel Durov, Founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, French local media reported.
According to the reports, the billionaire founder was detained upon arrival in France on his private jet. Such detention was related to the allegation of a lack of moderators on Telegram, which according to police enabled criminal activity to flourish on the platform.
Who is Pavel Durov?
- Russian-born Pavel Durov, aged 39, is the founder and owner of messaging app Telegram. Telegram is a free-to-use platform like Facebook’s WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and WeChat among others. The platform has a substantial user base across the world with being most popular in Russia, Ukraine, former Soviet Republics.
- The platform boasts of strong privacy through robust encryption, which has so far resisted any kind of government control with regard to content moderation, user restrictions, and others.
- Durov, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with the Russian government’s demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.
- He became a French citizen in 2021.
- The social media platform gained popularity amid the Russia-Ukraine war as most war-related news and views are shared by users on this platform. Even officials on both sides use this platform to conduct propaganda activities.
- It has come under intense scrutiny recently as the platform has been accused of being used by criminal gangs and even extremists & terrorists in running nefarious activities.
- A section of people also treats Durov as a strong voice for free speech, who has resisted all calls controls over Telegram.
