The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, placed under investigation in France, has said that French authorities should have approached his company with their complaints rather than detaining him, calling the arrest ‘“misguided”, reports The Guardian.
Durov, writing on his Telegram channel early on Friday in his first public comments since his detention last month, denied any suggestion the app was an “anarchic paradise”.
The Russian-born multi-billionaire said the investigation into the app was surprising in that French authorities had access to a “hot line” he had helped set up and they could have contacted Telegram’s EU representative at any time.
“If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself,” he wrote.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.”
Telegram, he said, was not perfect, but “the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue,” he wrote. “We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day.”