Telegram's billionaire founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested Saturday night outside Paris, he says Reuters, citing French TV stations TF1 TV and BFM TV who attributed the news to unnamed sources:
Durov was traveling on his private jet, TF1 reported on its website, adding that he had been the target of an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation.
TV stations TF1 and BFM both said the investigation focused on the lack of moderators on Telegram and that police believed this situation allowed criminal activities to continue undeterred on the messaging app.
The encrypted Telegram, with nearly a billion users, is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. It ranks as one of the biggest social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.
Russian-born Durov co-founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He fled Russia in 2014 when he refused to comply with government demands to shut down opposition channels on the social media platform VKontakte, which he sold.
When Russia launched the war in Ukraine in 2022, Telegram became the primary source of unfiltered—and sometimes misleading—content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict.
Russia began blocking Telegram in 2018 when the company refused to comply with a court order to give state security services access to its users' encrypted messages.
