Published in Svenska Dagbladet, 2024-08-26. Translated from Swedish.
Drug trafficking and contract killings take place on the messaging app Telegram. But that is not the whole story behind the arrest of its founder Pavel Durov, whose relationship with the Russian state raises many questions.
When Sweden’s justice minister invited social media companies for talks about crime last week, one company name was absent: Telegram. It is a little like inviting representatives of the fast food industry and leaving out McDonald’s. The reason Telegram was not present likely has a simple explanation — its representatives would not have come anyway. The app has become known as a haven for both unwelcome political views and outright illegal activity. At the weekend, founder Pavel Durov was arrested at a Paris airport, reportedly for failing to take action against the criminal activity occurring on the platform.
The underlying question has existed since the internet was popularised: are internet platforms responsible for what happens on them? The answer is not clear-cut and varies by jurisdiction. In the United States it is governed by what is known as Section 230, a 1996 law that both political parties have tried to revise without success — leaving it rather toothless and poorly adapted to the modern era. In the EU the relatively new Digital Services Act governs, requiring services with more than 45 million monthly users in the EU to meet stricter rules on content moderation.
For services like Instagram and Pinterest that threshold is straightforward — they are listed companies that report user figures regularly. For Telegram it is considerably less clear. How many users does Telegram have within the EU? Fewer than 45 million, at least — if you believe the company itself. A spokesperson for the Belgian postal and telecoms authority — responsible for regulating Telegram in Europe — expressed scepticism, but diplomatically: “Depending on how you count the number of active users, you can arrive at different figures.”
Telegram has responded to its CEO’s arrest on X with the words: “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the misuse of that platform.” For a service run by an avowed libertarian, that reaction is understandable. But it is in the direction of greater platform accountability that legislation is inevitably moving — whatever one thinks of it. Even in Sweden, greater focus has been placed on the platforms that serve as marketplaces for crime, as gang-related shootings have increased.
An additional complexity with Telegram specifically is its connection to Russia. Arrested founder Pavel Durov is a Russian-born billionaire who made his name as the founder of VKontakte, often described as Russia’s Facebook. In 2014 a stake in VKontakte was sold to a company linked to oligarch Alisher Usmanov, and Durov became wealthy. Despite the outcome, Durov has described the sale as forced by the Russian state when he refused to hand over data on its users. The deal has also been described as the motivation behind his desire to start a new kind of service — one where Russia could not influence how it was run. Around this time Durov also became a French citizen, one of at least four nationalities he holds. The new service became Telegram, an app today formally based in Dubai.
Given that description it is easy to view Telegram as a resistance movement against Russian censorship and data collection — and that may have been the original intent. But there are indications that Telegram is now being used as a tool for the opposite. Reports in Wired magazine in early 2023 gave examples of Russian security services citing Telegram messages in police interrogations of dissidents — messages that senders and recipients believed were secure and encrypted.
For a long time Telegram was also blocked in Russia, but in June 2020 the app was permitted again. Today it is the most popular messaging service in the country. When announcing that Telegram would be allowed back, the Russian government cited an agreement touching on matters “in the context of terrorism.” Telegram denies any such agreement existed, but the circumstances have created unease among users.
Exactly what Pavel Durov has been arrested for is not fully established. What is known is that Telegram went from being banned in Russia to becoming a popular channel for Russian communication — particularly in relation to the war in Ukraine. What caused the Kremlin to change its position is unclear. But to view Telegram only as a bastion of free speech would be to underestimate how certain countries use platforms like Telegram for their own purposes. Whether Telegram is a useful tool or a deliberate actor in this remains to be seen.
