Pavel Durov, the billionaire Russian-French founder of messaging app Telegram, was arrested on Saturday at Le Bourget airport in France.
The detention of the technology entrepreneur is said to be linked to an alleged lack of moderators on Telegram, which French law enforcement officials reportedly said could enable undeterred criminal activity.
There is no official explanation yet from Paris as to why Mr Durov, 39, a fierce advocate of protecting user data on his platform, was arrested.
But it has jolted the value of his investment in The Open Network (Ton), the blockchain app he jointly created to promote a decentralised internet, and sparked a debate about restrictions on free speech.
The National looks at why Mr Durov's arrest has drawn such strong responses from free-speech advocates and how the tech tycoon reached this level of influence worldwide by building one of the most used and free messaging apps.
What has Telegram said?
Shortly after his arrest, Telegram released a statement saying Mr Durov had “nothing to hide and frequently travels in Europe”, and that Telegram “abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act”. The app said its moderation is “within industry standards and constantly improving”.
“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” the Dubai-based tech company said.
Toncoin's drop and other linked companies
So far, the biggest victim of the drama surrounding Mr Durov is Toncoin, the cryptocurrency backed by Ton. However, despite Ton's claims that Toncoin is separate from them, the ties between Ton and Telegram built up Toncoin's potential.
From a high of $6.84 on Saturday – the day Mr Durov was arrested – Toncoin sank about 21.5 per cent to $5.37 on Sunday, data from CoinMarketCap shows. However, it has since recovered and was up 4.7 per cent at $5.62 at 3:57pm UAE time on Monday.
Still, Toncoin remains the 10th biggest cryptocurrency asset, with a market capitalisation of more than $14.3 billion, it said.
“Technical indicators suggest that Toncoin remains in a vulnerable position, having dropped below key support levels … this indicates that Toncoin may experience further downward pressure before finding stability,” analysts at Indian-based FinTech media company Coinpedia wrote.
A support level represents a price point at which an asset struggles to fall below over a given period of time.
Little is apparently known about Mr Durov's other ventures and companies linked to Telegram. Aside from the messaging platform, he has made a $25 million investment into Sand Sign, a gift service operating in Latin America, according to start-up data tracker Crunchbase.
However, the Sand Sign website redirects traffic to what is apparently a Russian website.
Is it about free speech?
The arrest of Mr Durov has, once again, sparked the debate on free speech – especially as it involves another tech figure who has made efforts to promote an open messaging arena.
Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk, a determined promoter of free speech, said his fellow billionaire's arrest was a sign of “dangerous times” and supported a #FreePavel movement on social media.
Mr Musk even went as far as taking a shot at Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg for not being arrested despite a “massive child exploitation problem” on Instagram.
Outside the French embassy in Moscow, at least three people held separate protests, with one holding a sign reading: “Freedom for Pavel Durov”.
Is his arrest politically motivated?
It remains unclear whether Mr Durov's arrest is politically motivated. However, France's Ofmin, an office with the task of preventing violence against minors, had issued his arrest warrant in a preliminary investigation into alleged offences including fraud, drug trafficking, cyber bullying, organised crime and promotion of terrorism.
Mr Durov was accused of failing to take action to curb the criminal use of his platform. Moscow is already working with its embassy in France to assist Mr Durov.
The Russian embassy “has immediately started” looking into the matter, “as it is supposed to in a case, when information comes that the receiving side has detained a Russian citizen”, state news agency Tass reported, quoting Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Sunday.
Ms Zakharova recalled an incident in 2018 when 26 non-government organisations – including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders – “condemned the Russian court’s ruling to block Telegram”, Tass wrote.
Russian-born Mr Durov lives in Dubai and holds dual UAE-French citizenship, according to the Telegram website.
How Telegram rose to fame
Telegram gained prominence in 2021 after Meta's apps ran into trouble in 2021, in addition to its announcement of sweeping reforms to WhatsApp's privacy terms and conditions, prompting users to flock to other messaging apps.
Mr Durov's platform welcomed a reported 70 million new users at that time.
Today, Telegram is the world's eighth most popular social media platform, with an estimated user base of about 900 million, information gathered by DataReportal shows.
Telegram's open-source and decentralised nature – similar to its contemporary Mastodon – means no single person or organisation owns or regulates it, similar to cryptocurrencies.
This is exactly the open-source ecosystem Mr Musk had envisioned for Twitter, which he acquired in a $44 billion deal in 2022 and eventually renamed to X.
Telegram's pitch is that it is a secure platform, but it isn't entirely. It heralds encryption security for specific chats.
The end-to-end encryption security is not set as a default setting for all users logging on to the app, and the extra privacy does not apply to every chatroom.
Users must activate its end-to-end encryption chat feature called "Secret Chats" for each of the one-on-one conversations they have with other users. Encryption is not available for Telegram's group chats or channels.
With encryption, the content of the "Secret Chats" messages will remain private.
Rise of the entrepreneur
Mr Durov graduated from Saint Petersburg State University, where he became popular for creating the school's spbgu.ru website.
He became famous for creating VKontakte in 2006, as an answer to Facebook, which was emerging and had been brought to his attention. It was at this time that Mr Durov was called “the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia”.
VKontakte was later rebranded to simply VK. Meanwhile, Telegram was founded by Mr Durov and his brother Nikolai in 2013.
Mr Durov's estimated net worth has varied. As of Monday, the Forbes Real-time Billionaires list put him in 120th position with $15.5 billion, while the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranked him 291st with $9.15 billion.
Why Telegram moved away from Russia
Mr Durov left Russia in 2014 “after losing control of his previous company for refusing to hand over the data of Ukrainian protesters to security agencies”, according to the Telegram website.
That company was VK, which remains popular to this day in Russia. That was also the same year in which the seeds for the continuing Russia-Ukraine war were planted.
Mr Pavel was reported to have sold his remaining stake in VK before he left the country.
After Mr Durov left Russia, Telegram was registered in the British Virgin Islands and as a limited liability company in Dubai, where it is based, according to the platform.
This is a corrected version of an earlier story that erroneously described the secure encryption features of the Telegram app.
