As Maillochon and other French journalists went on to report, prosecutors had been secretly investigating Durov for months over his and Telegram’s alleged failure to block illegal activity—which authorities claim included fraud, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), organized crime, and terrorism—on the platform. The French Gendarmerie alone had counted 2,460 cases between 2013 and 2024 in which legal requests made to Telegram had gone unanswered, according to the outlet Libération. Maylis de Roeck, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, told WIRED that when her team realized just how many investigations across different departments were being stymied by Telegram’s lack of response, they decided to issue an arrest warrant. As they saw it, Durov’s silence amounted to complicity.
In the immediate aftermath of the arrest, no one from Telegram commented publicly. One of Durov’s close associates, George Lobushkin—the former head of PR at VKontakte—told WIRED: “I am in shock, and everyone close to Pavel feels the same. Nobody was prepared for this situation.” Lobushkin added that he worried “a lot” about Telegram’s future if Durov remained in custody.
In the US, one of the first to react to the arrest was Tucker Carlson, the right-wing TV host. In a post on X, Carlson called Durov “a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies.” Elon Musk reposted a clip from Carlson’s interview and captioned it “#FreePavel.” Even Edward Snowden, a stern critic of Telegram’s security claims, expressed alarm. “I am surprised and deeply saddened that Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means for gaining access to private communications,” he wrote on X. Macron, for his part, issued a statement that France was “deeply committed to freedom of expression,” adding of the arrest: “It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”
On the Sunday evening after Durov’s arrest, his custody was extended to the 96-hour limit. According to Maillochon’s sources, he slept in a cramped cell, although investigators made the rare concession of letting Durov have a fresh set of clothes delivered. Under further questioning, Durov reportedly claimed he hadn’t been unresponsive to takedown requests from law enforcement; police had merely sent their requests to the wrong place. (Durov made a similar claim in 2022 when Brazil’s supreme court temporarily banned Telegram, essentially saying the court’s legal requests had been lost in the mail.) Durov also said he had been in touch with French intelligence services about terrorism cases.
On August 28, nearly four days after his arrest, Durov was formally indicted on six charges. The most serious—complicity in the administration of an online platform to enable organized crime and illicit transactions—carried a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment, as well as a €500,000 ($521,000) fine. With bail set at €5 million ($5.2 million) and swiftly paid, Durov was released that night but prohibited from leaving the country. He was also ordered to report to a police station twice a week.
The case against Durov, the CEO of a huge mainstream platform, was unprecedented. And it came at a moment when his professed libertarian ideals and laissez-faire attitude to content moderation seemed to be ascendant. The small size of Durov’s team had actually inspired Musk to fire 80 percent of Twitter’s staff when he took it over, according to Character Limit, a book by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Musk gutted the company’s moderation and trust-and-safety teams. If Durov could run a platform with about 60 full-time employees, most of them in Dubai, why not try something similar? More recently, Mark Zuckerberg fired Meta’s fact-checkers in the US and loosened the enforcement of rules against inflammatory content on the company’s platforms. The “recent elections,” Zuckerberg said, were a “cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.”