I was questioned by police for four days after arriving in Paris last month. They told me that I could be personally responsible for the illegal use of Telegram by others because the French authorities had not received a response from Telegram.
This is surprising for several reasons:
✅ Telegram has an official representative in the EU, responsible for accepting and responding to requests from the EU. Its email address is public and can be found by anyone searching for “Telegram EU law enforcement address” in the EU.
✅ There are many ways for the French authorities to contact me for help. As a French citizen, I frequently visit the French Consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when requested, I personally helped them set up a hotline with Telegram to deal with terrorist threats in France.
✅ If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the norm is to take legal action against the service itself. Using pre-smartphone laws to charge a CEO with third-party crimes on the platform he manages is a misguided approach. Technology development is hard enough. Innovators wouldn’t develop new tools if they knew they could be held personally liable for potential misuse of those tools.
Striking the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, local laws with EU laws. You have to take into account technical limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent globally, while also ensuring they cannot be abused in countries with weak rule of law. We are always 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 users in authoritarian regimes. But we are always open to dialogue.
Sometimes we cannot agree with a country’s regulators on the right balance between privacy and security. In such cases, we are ready to leave that country. We have done this many times. When Russia asked us to hand over “encryption keys” for surveillance purposes, we refused – Telegram is banned in Russia. When Iran asked us to block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused – Telegram is banned in Iran. We are ready to leave markets that are incompatible with our principles because we are not in it for the money. We are in it to bring good and defend people’s fundamental rights, especially where these rights are violated.
All of this doesn’t mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities might be confused about where to send requests is something we should improve. But the claims by some media that Telegram is some kind of anarchist paradise are absolutely untrue. We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (such as this one or this one). We have a direct hotline with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster.
However, we hear some say this is not enough. The sudden increase in the number of Telegram users to 950 million created growing pains and made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I’ve made it my personal goal to ensure significant progress in this area. We have started this process internally and I will share more details about our progress with you soon.
I hope that the events of August will make Telegram, and the entire social networking industry, safer and stronger. Thanks again for the love and memes 🙏
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