❤️ Thank you all for your support and love!
Last month, after arriving in Paris, I was interviewed by the police for four days. I was told that I could be held personally responsible for other people's illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities had not received a response from Telegram.
This was surprising for several reasons:
1. Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and responds to EU requests. Their email address is publicly available to anyone in the EU who Googles “Telegram EU address for law enforcement.”
2. The French authorities had many ways of contacting me for help. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped set up a Telegram hotline to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.
3. If a country is dissatisfied with an internet service, the standard 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. Developing technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever create new tools if he knows he can be held personally liable for potential abuse of those tools.
Striking the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. Privacy laws need to be reconciled with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with EU laws. Technological limitations need to be taken into account. As a platform, we want our processes to be consistent globally, but we also want to ensure that they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We are committed to working with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles – our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes – but we have always been open to dialogue.
Sometimes we can’t come to an agreement 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 willing to leave markets that are not compatible with our principles, because we are not in it for the money. We are driven by the intention to do good and to defend people’s basic rights, particularly in places where these rights are violated.
All of this doesn’t mean that Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities can get confused about where to send requests is something we should improve. But claims by some media outlets that Telegram is some kind of lawless paradise are absolutely false. We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this one or this one). We have hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster.
However, we hear voices saying that it is not enough. The abrupt increase in the number of Telegram users to 950 million led to increasing difficulties that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That is why I made it my personal goal to ensure that we significantly improve things in this regard. We have already started that process internally and I will share more details about our progress with you very soon.
I hope the events of August will help make Telegram (and the social media industry as a whole) safer and stronger. Thanks again for your love and memes 🙏
