Telegram founder ignored warnings about app’s content

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Pavel Durov’s legal battle with French prosecutors took the Telegram founder by surprise. But some of the app’s avid users have long warned him of the need for less-freewheeling management.

Among the warnings: More than two dozen organizations wrote a letter to Durov in late 2021, asking him to implement transparent content rules and policies, develop ways for people to communicate with his company and add an appeals process for frustrated parties. Durov didn’t respond, the organizations said. The organizations’ users, focused primarily on human rights, journalism advocacy and internet freedom, had embraced Telegram as a tool to organize protests and share information, but they were frustrated.

In the letter, they cited Telegram’s “opaque and arbitrary decisions" around human-rights compliance and lack of responsiveness to reports of abuses on its app, as well as a lack of many basic security functions.Now Durov is defending himself against charges that he was complicit in distributing child pornography, illegal drugs and hacking software, following his arrest late last month. French authorities also charged him with refusing to cooperate with European authorities to address illegal content. “As Telegram grew, you can justify less and less the absence of meaningful processes and policies," said Natalia Krapiva, senior tech legal counsel at Access Now, a group that advocates for human rights on the internet and that spearheaded the 2021 letter.