(Reuters) – Telegram messaging app founder Pavel Durov, who is under investigation in France, said early on Friday that French authorities should have directed their complaints to his company rather than detaining him.
Durov, writing on his Telegram channel in his first public comments since his arrest last month, denied any suggestion that the app was an “anarchic paradise.”
He said the investigation into the app was surprising because French authorities had access to a “hotline” he helped set up and could have contacted Telegram’s representative to the EU at any time.
“If a country is unhappy with an Internet service, the established practice is to take legal action against the service itself,” he writes.
“Using pre-smartphone laws to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is the wrong approach.”
Telegram, he said, was not perfect, but he denied any abuse associated with the app.
“But the claims of some media outlets that Telegram is some kind of anarchic paradise are absolutely false,” he wrote. “We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day.”
Durov, who was born in Russia but is now a French citizen, was arrested late last month in France as part of an investigation into crimes related to child pornography, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions associated with the app.
(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Dominique Patton; Editing by Chris Reese and Lisa Shumaker)
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