Russian business tycoon Pavel Durov was arrested on 24 August as he arrived in Paris on his private jet from Azerbaijan. Although released after four days of questioning, his arrest led to a diplomatic furore between France, the UAE, and Russia.
It has also triggered scathing criticism of the attack on free speech by state machinery from the likes of Elon Musk and Edward Snowden.
The case of Durov is rather curious.
Originally Russian, Durov holds citizenship with France, the UAE, and Saint Kitts and Nevis.
For the uninitiated, Durov is a billionaire and the CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform, co-founded with his talented coder brother Nikolai. Telegram remains one of the most popular messaging apps globally and has been under the scanner of the French authorities since November 2023. In 2022, German authorities, too, had fined Telegram €5 million for failing to comply with German law.
Many shades of Durov
An enigma himself, Durov leads an unusual lifestyle. He claims to have fathered over 100 children through sperm donation, otherwise leading an ascetic life with strict dietary and personal restrictions. Despite this image, the French police have alleged that he has raped a child.
The new-age ascetic billionaire with apparent personality paradoxes was about a month away from turning 40 when he got arrested by French authorities at the Le Bourget airport in Paris. He faced serious charges—refusal to share data on alleged transactions of financial crimes on Telegram, drug trafficking, and, among others, selling and indulging in sexual crimes against children.
As per the latest reports, French authorities have indicted him with six charges related to a range of illicit activities on Telegram. France follows the EU’s Digital Services Act, enacted in 2022, which requires the moderation of social media content by its owners. This law makes it mandatory for owners of social media platforms to comply with state authorities when a criminal matter comes to light. The law clearly stipulates that companies can be held accountable for the content that appears on their platforms.
For now, Durov has been released from custody on a €5 million bail, but he is forbidden from leaving France and has to notify his presence at the police station twice a week.
Following this chain of events, an intriguing question comes to mind. The charges against Durov date back to November 2023 at least. After a fresh investigation ensued in February 2024, French authorities had issued arrest warrants for Durov and his brother Nikolai on 25 March.
The bottom line is, he always knew he would get arrested if he travelled to France. And he still did.
Something about his nonchalant visit to Paris from Baku doesn’t add up.
Even if his real intentions and fate are not known at the moment, there is certainly more to this James Hadley Chase-esque thriller of a Russian boy’s journey to becoming a ‘free-speech absolutist’ billionaire. He raked in moolah playing hide and seek with the most sensitive and explosive phenomenon of our times: data and its regulation.
While reflecting on Durov’s rise to unprecedented prominence and his apparent fall from grace, one’s thoughts revisit the argument made by Yuval Harari in his magnum opus Homo Deus.
The current epoch is indeed marked by the unbridled power of data flows over the future of human societies. Whoever controls data flows holds the key to money, power, influence, and crime. In plain words, it determines the very basis of human life in the emerging global digital order. This remains a new ‘Leviathan’, an untameable headless beast, and perhaps the biggest challenge before the human endeavour to preserve the human element in its journey into technocratic time.
Data flows, post-Westphalian by nature, do not ascribe to national boundaries and passport identities. The orderless interface of man vs technology runs amuck with uncontrollable repercussions for one and all until fair regulatory frameworks can emerge.
The paradox is, regulation of data is a question of ethics.
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The making of ‘Durov phenomenon’
Durov’s rise to fame dates back to pre-Telegram days. He was regarded as a teenage prodigy and an ‘individualistic’ tech nerd supporting free speech. He founded the Russian version of Facebook, the VKontakte in 2006. His brother Nikolai wrote the code and Durov built the Russian Facebook empire to its helm.
However, the Durov brothers’ commitment to freedom of speech often clashed with President Putin’s regime. It turned murky with the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution when Kyiv’s vox populi stood up in a mass uprising against the Kremlin-backed regime of Victor Yanukovych.
Evidently contrary to Russian interests, Vkontakte was pressured by the Russian authorities to divulge the details of those who had participated in the revolution, a directive that the “brothers Karamazov” denied as long as they could before deciding to let go of Vkontatke and flee Russia in 2014.
By then, however, they had learnt their lesson. Durov had founded a new platform, Telegram, that was particularly suited to engaging and expressing mass public opinion. It enabled the sharing of huge files, the creation of enormous groups with more than hundreds of thousands of members, and allowed for chat-log to be un-retrievable, keeping the users’ identities hidden and safe from state scrutiny.
The Durov brothers again ran in trouble with Putin in 2018, refusing to share the personal details of their users, but finally complied in 2020, wary of the earlier experience with Vkontakte.
Unfortunately but expectedly, however, in the interregnum from 2013 to 2023, the app—due to its algorithm protecting the user’s identity and exchanges with others—grew into a safe haven for all kinds of illegal activities, leading to the events that resulted in Durov’s arrest recently.
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Diplomatic kitsch
Attack on the freedom of speech is easily the most obvious rebuttal to Durov’s arrest. But the interesting bit is who it came from and why.
Musk, who has been one of the most vocal critics of Durov’s arrest, has been particularly unforgiving of France’s alleged high-handedness. What is less known is that he has a personal axe to grind with European regulations. The EU has been probing X’s violations of the Digital Services Act as well as the EU’s rules in countering illegal content.
The most ironical criticism comes from Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesperson, who seems most enthusiastic about warning France against targeting a native Russian. The same voices in Russia drove Durov out of the country for his support to Maidan in 2013. What really irks Russia is that Telegram remains the de-facto communication platform within the Russian army in Ukraine.
There is indeed unease in the Kremlin over details that could be leaked to Western media. Naturally, they are opposing Durov’s arrest invoking free speech.
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India’s tussles with Telegram
By hook or crook, a crackdown on Telegram has been a boon for India. Lately, anti-India content had been increasing on the app. It had become the go-to site for terrorist organisations like Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Since 2024 particularly, it seemed to have become a platform to access videos and graphics of heart-wrenching terrorist attacks on Indian armed forces. It has already been reported several times that outfits related directly or indirectly to ISIS and Al-Qaeda have been using Telegram to recruit Jihadis.
The situation deteriorated to such an extent that India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued a legal notice to Telegram in 2023, directing it to remove material related to children’s sexual abuse.
Part of this crisis is rooted in the structure of the app, which allows all kinds of activity, including illegal activity, to be carried out unbridled and away from the state’s reach.
The Durov episode underscores just how unprepared and vulnerable the world is to unregulated digital undoing, oscillating between extremes of free speech and the goriest of crimes. Even if universal regulation around it seems far, the learning is here to be imbibed by all.
Swasti Rao is an Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
This is pure stupid idea if telegram close. Because telegram is main source for many poor background students who cannot afford course. Goverment need to ban those accounts who spread terrorism rather than banning the whole app. This way instagram is destroying the future of Indian youth by vulgar content, facebook is a of data leak , terrorist group, and all illegal activities. Twitter my god a brainwashed platform where only racists, hatred, polarised, and after elon a new po@nhub , where u get any type of adult content.
Does govt have guts?? Or only suck west