Telegram’s Pavel Durov built a haven for free speech —and child predators

When Telegram CEO Pavel Durov sat down in his Dubai offices with Tucker Carlson in April, he drove home a high-minded message: “Humanity” needs a neutral messaging app like Telegram that respects “people’s privacy and freedom”.

That vision brought the Russian-born Durov wild success. Telegram has amassed more than 950 million users drawn by its freewheeling atmosphere and its promise not to share data with law enforcement.

But the messaging service’s anything-goes approach to online content has also made it one of the internet’s largest havens for child predators, experts say. French prosecutors charged Durov on Wednesday with complicity in the distribution of child sex abuse images and other wrongdoing on Telegram, following the billionaire’s dramatic arrest last week at a Paris airport.

Durov’s legal travails in France, where he has to post a bond of $5.6 million and check in with police twice a week while investigations continue, has made him a cause célèbre among some American conservatives. In some realms of the internet, he is portrayed as a fearless warrior for free speech and against overzealous state authorities. Meanwhile, Durov’s critics say his public idealism masks an opportunistic business model that allows Telegram to profit from the worst the internet has to offer, including child sexual abuse material, or CSAM.

“I don’t think that freedom of speech is his ideology,” said Anton Rosenberg, a Russian software engineer who helped co-found Telegram with Durov and his brother Nikolai Durov in 2013 before falling out with the brothers and leaving the company, in a text message conversation with The Washington Post. “Pavel has found the idea that helped his project to grow. And he [successfully] exploited this topic. But his behavior regularly contradicts his own public slogans.”

Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.

In an online world split between big, public social networks and private messaging apps, Telegram blends the two. Users can hold private, encrypted chats like they can on iMessage or WhatsApp. But they can also form large group chats or public “channels,” whose members, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of thousands, can remain anonymous and in many cases unpoliced.

Over the years, that hybrid approach has made Telegram an app of choice for political organizing, including by dissidents under repressive regimes. But it is equally appealing for terrorist groups, criminal organizations and sexual predators, who use it as a hub to share and consume nonconsensual pornography, AI “deepfake” nudes, and illegal sexual images and videos of exploited minors, said Alex Stamos, chief information security officer at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne.

“Due to their advertised policy of not cooperating with law enforcement, and the fact that they are known not to scan for CSAM, Telegram has attracted large groups of pedophiles trading and selling child abuse materials,” Stamos said. That reach comes even though many Telegram exchanges don’t actually use the strong forms of encryption available on true private messaging apps, he added.

Telegram is used for private messaging, public posts and group chats. Only one-to-one conversations can be encrypted in a way that even Telegram can’t access them. And that occurs only if users choose the option, meaning the company could turn over everything else to governments if it wanted to.

Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told The Post in March that “child abuse and calls to violence are explicitly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service.” In a statement following Durov’s arrest, Telegram said it “abides by E.U. laws” and characterized its content moderation as “within industry standards and constantly improving.”

“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” the company added, a statement echoed by Durov’s lawyer after his indictment Wednesday.

French prosecutors argue that Durov is in fact responsible for Telegram’s emergence as a global haven for illegal content, including CSAM, because of his reluctance to moderate it and his refusal to help authorities police it, among other allegations.

Before Telegram, Durov founded a social network called VKontakte that became Russia’s answer to Facebook. He left the country, and VKontakte, in 2014 over what he said was a dispute with Russian authorities who wanted him to hand over data on Ukrainian protesters.

Since then, the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia” has trotted the globe but rarely offered interviews - preferring to upload shirtless selfies onto his Instagram account, where he has also showcased his luxurious work-from-anywhere ethos with jaunts to Italy, Kyrgyzstan and Antibes on the French Riviera.

Then came his stunning arrest on Saturday, which turned Durov into a free-speech icon online, especially among the far right.

The QAnon-linked group The Patriot Voice said Durov’s detention was part of a larger campaign to suppress freedom of speech. Other X accounts said Telegram is less of a danger to children than the real enemies, such as the organizers of the Olympic opening ceremony, whom they saw as staging a decadent mockery of Jesus’ Last Supper.

Durov also drew praise from another self-proclaimed champion of free speech: X owner Elon Musk, who posted the #FreePavel hashtag on Sunday along with a clip of Durov praising him in the April interview with Carlson.

On Friday, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy suggested the fates of X and Telegram are linked, saying: “It’s Telegram today. It’ll be X tomorrow.” Musk replied with a “100” emoji, signaling agreement.

Some online speech experts and privacy advocates agreed that France’s indictment of Durov raises concerns for online freedoms, pointing in particular to charges relating to Telegram’s use of cryptography, which is also employed by Apple’s iMessage, Meta’s WhatsApp and Signal.

“French law enforcement has long hated encryption,” said David Kaye, a professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law and former U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression. “This seems like a potential avenue for them to blame what happens on Telegram at least in part on encryption, when the truth is that the other counts suggest that Telegram’s noncooperation with judicial orders is the real problem.”

Stamos agreed the charges related to cryptography are “concerning,” because “that seems to apply even to platforms that are actively working to prevent the spread of child sexual abuse material.” He said that while Telegram has at times banned groups and taken down content in response to law enforcement, its refusal to share data with investigators sets it apart from most other major tech companies.

Unlike U.S.-based platforms, Telegram is not required by U.S. law to report instances of CSAM to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. Many online platforms based overseas do so anyway - but not Telegram.

“NCMEC has tried to get them to report, but they have no interest and are known for not wanting to work with [law enforcement agencies] or anyone in this space,” a NCMEC spokesperson said.

Telegram has repeatedly been revealed to serve as a tool to store, distribute and share child sexual imagery. In July, a Virginia Beach man pleaded guilty to using Telegram to solicit explicit photos of 12- to 14-year-old children. A former FBI contractor confessed to purchasing hundreds of videos and images of child sexual abuse imagery through Telegram, according to a November Justice Department announcement.

A U.S. Army soldier was arrested last week for allegedly creating public Telegram groups to store child sexual abuse imagery and sending himself video files that included children being raped, court documents said.

On Wednesday, South Korea opened an investigation into a labyrinth of Telegram group chats where anonymous users submitted photos of South Korean girls and women that were turned into sexual imagery without their permission using artificial intelligence.

Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the security, trust and safety initiative at Cornell Tech in New York, said Telegram has become a de facto storefront for the makers of AI “nudifier” apps that violate the rules of Google’s and Apple’s app stores.

“Telegram has a dual appeal for deepfake nude providers,” he said. “First and foremost, it is under-moderated, so you can get away with - and I have seen - channels promoting apps that let you swap in the faces of known individuals into porn clips. Second of all, it is a one-stop shop: You can market, sell, and troubleshoot your AI nudifier all in the same place.”

While deepfake nudes can also be distributed via private messaging, Mantzarlis said Telegram offers a scale and ease of use that makes it attractive for entrepreneurs looking to reach as many customers as possible.

“With great ease, I have found 11 channels dedicated to promoting AI nudifiers,” he said. “The largest has almost 300,000 subscribers.”

In Durov’s interview with Carlson - an uncontentious, wide-ranging, nearly hour-long discussion in Durov’s office against a backdrop that included a bookcase adorned with statuettes of genitalia - he said Telegram’s real battle is with Google and Apple, who threaten to take Telegram off their app stores if they host content the tech giants disagree with.

“There must be no violence, discrimination, publicly available child abuse materials. It’s hard to disagree with that,” Durov told the former Fox News host. He added, however, that Telegram often disagrees with how Apple and Google interpret what falls in those categories. Sometimes, he said, “we think actually this is [a] legitimate way of people expressing their opinions.”

Apple and Google declined to comment beyond both confirming that Telegram has taken down content at their behest to comply with their respective app stores’ rules.

Rosenberg, the Telegram co-founder, said Durov talks up Telegram’s security, but the reality of the app is different.

“He could say that Telegram is the most secure messenger,” Rosenberg said, “but doesn’t care [about] security.”

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Ellen Francis, Joe Menn and Drew Harwell contributed to this report.

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