This is the message that Pavel Durov shared today on his official Telegram channel:

Thank you all for your support and love.

Last month, I was questioned by the police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told that I could be held personally liable for other people's illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities received no responses from Telegram.

This was surprising for several reasons:

1. Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and responds to EU requests. Its email address has been publicly available to anyone in the EU who Googles “Telegram address for law enforcement in the EU.”

2. The French authorities had numerous ways of contacting me for assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent visitor to the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped set up a Telegram hotline to address the threat of terrorism in France.

3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to take legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to accuse a CEO of crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is the wrong approach. Building technology is hard enough. No innovator will build new tools if he knows he can be held personally liable for potential misuse of those tools.

Striking the right balance between privacy and security isn’t easy. You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with EU laws. You also have to take into account technological limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent globally, but also ensure they aren’t abused in countries with weak rule of law. We’ve committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand firm on our principles – our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes. But we’ve always been open to dialogue.

Sometimes, we can’t agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. In those cases, we are willing to leave that country. We have done so many times. When Russia demanded that we hand over “encryption keys” to enable surveillance, we refused, and Telegram was banned in Russia. When Iran demanded that we block the channels of peaceful protesters, we refused, and Telegram was banned in Iran. We are prepared to leave markets that are not compatible with our principles, because we are not in this for money. We are driven by the intention to do good and to defend people’s basic rights, especially in places where these rights are violated.

All of this doesn't mean that Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities can be confused about where to send requests is something we should improve. But claims in some media that Telegram is some kind of lawless paradise are absolutely false. We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish transparency reports daily. We have hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests more quickly.

However, we hear voices saying that it is not enough. The abrupt increase in the number of Telegram users, which now totals 950 million, caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That is why I have made it a personal goal to ensure that we significantly improve in this area. We have already begun that process internally, and I will share more details about our progress soon.

I hope the events of August result in making Telegram, and the social media industry in general, safer and stronger. Thanks again for your support and the memes.

- Pavel Durov

After this message was published, $TON has experienced a surge.📈