Founder of Telegram app Pavel Durov has to appear in court after his arrest in Paris | Social media

Russian-born Telegram founder Pavel Durov is due to appear before a French court in the coming days after being arrested at Paris airport on suspicion of crimes related to the messaging app.

Sources told AFP that the French-Russian tech billionaire will appear in court after being arrested by police at Le Bourget airport. French investigators had issued an arrest warrant for Durov as part of an investigation into fraud, drug trafficking, organized crime, promoting terrorism and cyberbullying.

Durov is accused of failing to take action against the criminal use of his platform. He was arrested when he arrived in Paris on his private jet from Baku on Saturday evening. “End Telegram's impunity,” said an investigator who was surprised that Durov flew to Paris knowing he was a wanted man.

The Russian authorities accused France of “refusing to cooperate”. The Russian embassy in Paris has requested access to Durov and said that France has so far “stayed out of the discussion”.

Durov left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with Kremlin demands to close opposition groups on the social network VK, which he founded at age 22. He left VK after a dispute with its Kremlin-aligned owners and turned his attention to Telegram, the app he founded with his brother Nikolai in 2013.

Initially, Telegram was similar to other messaging apps, but it has since evolved into a social network in its own right. In addition to one-on-one communication, users can join groups of up to 200,000 people and create broadcast “channels” that others can follow and leave comments on.

With 950 million monthly active users, Telegram has become a major source of information – and disinformation – about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Durov lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based, and holds French and United Arab Emirates (UAE) citizenship. He recently said he tried to settle in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco before settling on Dubai, which he praised for its business environment and “neutrality.”

In the United Arab Emirates, Telegram faces little pressure to moderate its content as Western governments try to crack down on hate speech, disinformation, the sharing of child abuse images and other illegal content.

Telegram offers end-to-end encrypted messaging and allows users to create channels to spread information to followers. The app is particularly popular in the former Soviet Union and is widely used by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his entourage, as well as politicians across Ukraine, to post information about the war. It is also one of the few places where Russians can get unfiltered information about the conflict after the Kremlin tightened media controls in the wake of the large-scale invasion.

Its seemingly unbreakable encryption has made Telegram a haven for extremists and conspiracy theorists. Investigative journalists at the Central European news site VSquare said it had become the “tool of choice for Russian propagandists, both left and right radicals, American QAnon and conspiracy theorists” and concluded it was an “ecosystem for the radicalization of opinion.”

The app has also been widely used by far-right agitators planning anti-immigration rallies in England and Northern Ireland following the stabbing of three children during a dance class in Southport last month.

Anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate concluded that Telegram had become the “app of choice” for racists and violent extremists and a “cesspool of anti-Semitic content”, with minimal moderation or efforts by the app to curb extremist content.

Former Russian president and later deputy head of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, claimed that Durov made a mistake when he fled Russia, thinking he would never have to cooperate with foreign intelligence services. “He miscalculated,” Medvedev said. “For all our common enemies, he is Russian – and therefore unpredictable and dangerous.”

After the arrest, right-wing US commentator and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson described Durov in an article on X as “a living warning to all platform owners who refuse to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intelligence agencies”.

In an interview with Carlson earlier this year, Durov said the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics.”

In the interview, Durov said he came up with the idea of ​​launching an encrypted messaging app when he came under pressure from the Russian government while working at VK.

He said users “love the independence” of the Telegram app. “They also love the privacy, the freedom, [there are] “There are many reasons why someone would switch to Telegram,” he told Carlson.

Billionaire social media tycoon Elon Musk posted a clip from that interview, in which Durov praised Musk's acquisition of X as a “great development,” with the hashtag “FreePavel.” He followed it up with a second tweet: “Liberté! Liberté! Liberté?”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who gave up his own presidential candidacy last week to support Donald Trump, said of the arrest: “The need to protect free speech has never been more urgent.”