$DOGS Late at night on August 28 local time, French authorities announced preliminary charges against Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, banning him from leaving France pending further investigation.
As part of a comprehensive investigation that began in the first half of this year, Durov was arrested at Le Bourget Airport outside Paris last Saturday. After more than 80 hours of detention and interrogation, Durov was released on Wednesday morning. According to a statement from the Paris prosecutor's office, the investigating judge filed preliminary charges and Durov was required to pay a bail of 5 million euros (about 39.53 million yuan), report to the police twice a week, and must not leave France.
The prosecution listed 12 charges, including conspiracy to disseminate child sexual abuse images, assisting organized crime and refusing to provide information to law enforcement agencies. Among them, "conspiracy to commit a crime" is the key word in the indictment, and a single charge can lead to up to 10 years in prison and a fine of 500,000 euros.
Durov is the "only person involved at this stage." While not ruling out the possibility that others are under investigation, prosecutors said in a statement to The Associated Press that other arrest warrants would only be disclosed if the targets of the warrants were detained and informed of their rights.
The prosecutor's office said Telegram played a role in multiple criminal cases in France involving child sexual abuse, drug trafficking and online hate crimes, but the program had been "almost completely unresponsive" to requests for cooperation from law enforcement.
It is reported that despite Telegram having 950 million registered users, the app is neither a member of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) nor a member of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) - both of which have partnership programs with most social media platforms, including Snap, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok.
On the other hand, the (Digital Services Act) implemented by the European Union since 2023 clearly stipulates that digital platforms are obliged to delete illegal and harmful content. Violators may be fined up to 6% of their global annual revenue, and in serious cases they may be ordered to withdraw from the European market.
Durov's arrest has sparked a new round of global debate about freedom and control, privacy and security, with the core focus being whether technology company executives should be responsible for the content on their platforms.
Daphne Keller, a professor at Stanford Law School, told the New York Times that "knowledge" is the key to determining guilt. This means that French prosecutors and law enforcement agencies need to prove that technology executives knew that there were illegal activities on the platforms they founded or managed, but did not try to curb the harm.
Previously, there were few cases of technology company executives being arrested for platform user regulation. Among the few cases, the most notable one was on April 30 this year, when Zhao Changpeng, the founder of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, was sentenced to four months in prison and fined $4.32 billion in the United States for allowing cyber criminals to launder money on the platform, which overlaps with Durov's charges.
In addition, former Yahoo CEO Timothy Kugler faced charges in France in 2002 for selling Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo’s website, but was later acquitted, and in 2016 Brazil briefly jailed a Facebook executive for refusing to hand over data from the WhatsApp messaging platform as part of a drug trafficking investigation.
