Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov issued his first statement since his arrest last month. On his Telegram channel, he condemned the charges, calling the arrest “surprising” and a “misguided approach”. He said that if French authorities had any complaints, they should have approached the company first instead of detaining him. Durov was arrested on August 25 for alleged crimes related to his messaging app. According to reports, French authorities issued an arrest warrant in a preliminary investigation into alleged crimes including fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime and promoting terrorism.

In the post, Durov also said that the title of the app being a “chaos paradise” is not true. He said that Telegram is not perfect, but, “There are claims in some media that Telegram is some kind of chaos paradise, which is absolutely false. We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports. We have direct hotlines with NGOs to quickly process urgent moderation requests.”

Pavel Durov’s arrest was a surprise to him

Durov listed a few points that explain why the arrest was surprising. He said he found it strange how French authorities approached him. “The French authorities had several ways to contact me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I frequently visited the French consulate in Dubai. Some time ago, when asked, I personally helped them set up a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France,” he said.

In the post, he said that if a country is not happy with an internet service, then legal action should be initiated against that service as per the existing rules. He said, “Using laws from before the era of smartphones to accuse a CEO of crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a wrong approach.”

Why is Telegram a chaos paradise?

Telegram’s large group capacity, which includes up to 200,000 members, has raised concerns among critics. They believe it creates a way to facilitate false information and provides a platform for users to share harmful content, including conspiracy theories, hate speech, child abuse material, and terrorism-related content.

The Telegram app has come under criticism in Britain for harboring far-right channels that played a key role in coordinating violent unrest in several English cities last month, leading to increased scrutiny of it and calls for greater accountability.

In his statement on Thursday, Durov acknowledged that the “sudden increase” in the number of users on the messaging app — which he put at 950 million — has “led to increasing problems, making it easier for criminals to abuse our platform.”

He said his goal would be to “bring about significant improvements in this regard.”

Following Pavel Durov’s arrest, Telegram has quietly removed the end-to-end encryption feature for private chats. Previously, the FAQs page stated that private chats were protected from moderation requests, but that is no longer the case. The company has taken this step after being accused of continuing criminal activities.