❤️ 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 responsible for other people's illegal use of Telegram, since the French authorities had not received any answers from Telegram. This was surprising for several reasons:
1. Telegram has an official representative in the EU who receives and responds to EU requests. His email address has been made publicly available to anyone in the EU who Googles "Telegram EU law enforcement address".
2. The French authorities had many ways to contact me to ask for help. As a French citizen, I was a frequent visitor to the French consulate in Dubai. Some time ago, when asked, I personally helped them set up a hotline with Telegram to combat the threat of terrorism in France.
3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, it is common practice to file a lawsuit against the service itself. Using pre-smartphone laws to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he runs is a misguided approach. Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever create new tools if they know they could be held personally liable for potential abuse of those tools.
Finding the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You need to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with EU laws. You need to consider technological limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent across the world, but also to ensure that they are not subject to abuse in countries with weak rule of law. We are committed to working with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stick to 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 agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. In such cases, we are willing to leave that country. We have done it 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 channels of peaceful protesters, we refused — and Telegram was banned in Iran. We are willing to leave markets that are incompatible with our principles because we are not doing this for the money. We are driven by the intention to do good and protect people’s fundamental rights, especially in places where those rights are violated.
None of this means that Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities can be confused about where to send requests is something we can improve. But claims in some media outlets that Telegram is some kind of anarchic paradise are completely untrue. We remove millions of malicious posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this one or this one ). We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests more quickly.
However, we hear voices saying that this is not enough. Telegram’s dramatic increase in user numbers to 950 million has caused growing pains that have made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I’ve set myself the goal of making significant improvements in this regard. We’ve already started this process internally, and I’ll be sharing more details about our progress with you very soon.
I hope that the events of August will lead to Telegram — and the entire social media industry — becoming safer and stronger. Thanks again for your love and memes 🙏 $TON
