Telegram Faces a Reckoning in Europe. Other Founders Should Beware

“[Elon] Musk and fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability,” said Bruce Daisley, a former executive at Twitter, who worked at the company’s British office, days after British protesters tried to set fire to a hotel for asylum seekers.

But Telegram has provoked politicians more than any other platform. What could be called the company’s uncollaborative approach has put the platform—part messaging app, part social media network—on a collision course with governments around the world.

The case in France is far from the first time Telegram has been reprimanded by authorities for its refusal to cooperate. Telegram has been temporarily suspended twice in Brazil, in 2022 and 2023, both times after being accused of failing to cooperate with legal orders.

In 2022, similar events unfolded in Germany when the country’s interior minister also threatened to ban the app after letters, suggestions of fines, and even a Telegram-dedicated task force all went unanswered, according to the authorities, who were concerned about anti-lockdown groups using the app to discuss political assassinations. Multiple German newspapers, including the tabloid Bild, sent journalists to the office Telegram states as its headquarters in Dubai and found it deserted, its doors locked.

Earlier in 2024, Spain briefly blocked Telegram after broadcasters claimed copyrighted material was circulating on the app. Judge Santiago Pedraz of Spain’s National High Court said his decision to ban was based on Telegram’s lack of cooperation with the case.

The accusations in France are very specific to Telegram’s way of working, says Arne Möhle, cofounder of encrypted email service Tuta. “Of course it’s important to be independent but at the same time, it’s also important to comply with authority requests if they are valid,” he says. “It’s important to show [criminal activities are] something you don’t want to support with your privacy-oriented service.”

France’s decision to charge Durov is a rare move to link a tech executive to crimes taking place on their platform, but it is not without precedent. Durov joins the ranks of the founders of The Pirate Bay, who were sentenced by Swedish authorities to a year in prison in 2009; and the German-born founder of MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom, who finally lost a 12-year battle to be extradited to the US from his home in New Zealand in August. He plans to appeal.

Yet Durov is the first of his generation of founders behind major social media platforms to face such severe consequences. What happens next will carry lessons for them all.

Bastien Le Querrec, legal officer at French digital freedom group La Quadrature du Net, does not defend Telegram’s lack of moderation. But he is concerned that the case against Durov reflects the huge pressure both social media and messaging apps are under right now to collaborate with law enforcement.

“[The prosecutor] refers to a provision in French law that requires platforms to disclose any useful document that could allow law enforcement to do interception of communication,” he says. “To our knowledge, it’s the first time that a platform, whatever its size, would be prosecuted [in France] because it refused to disclose such documents. It’s a very worrying precedent.”