Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has broken his silence nearly two weeks after his arrest in France, stating the charges are misguided.
"If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself," Durov said in a 600-word statement on his Telegram account.
"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."
Durov was charged late last month for enabling various forms of criminal activity on Telegram, including drug trafficking and money laundering, following a probe into an unnamed person's distribution of child sexual abuse material on the messaging service.
He also highlighted the struggles to balance both privacy and security, noting that Telegram is ready to exit markets that aren't compatible with its mission to "protect our users in authoritarian regimes."
Durov also blamed "growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform." The popular messaging app recently crossed 950 million monthly active users.
"That's why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard," he said. "We've already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon."
The company has since updated its FAQ to allow users to report illegal content within private and group chats by flagging it for review using a dedicated "Report" button, a major policy shift and a feature that was previously off-limits.
A previous version of the FAQ had stated: "All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them."
Durov's statement, however, doesn't delve into the lack of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protections by default, which users have to explicitly enable in one-to-one chats.
"It is also a 'cloud messenger,' meaning that all messages live on Telegram's servers rather than the user's device," Moxie Marlinspike, creator of the E2EE messaging app Signal, pointed out.
"With one query, the Russian Telegram team can get every message the French president has ever sent or received to his contacts, every message those contacts have ever sent or received to their contacts, every message those contacts' contacts have ever sent or received, etc."
Matthew Green, a security researcher and an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, further called out the platform for making it an onerous process that requires at least four clicks on Telegram's iOS app.
"The feature is explicitly not turned on for the vast majority of conversations, and is only available for one-on-one conversations, and never for group chats with more than two people in them," Green said.
"As a kind of a weird bonus, activating end-to-end encryption in Telegram is oddly difficult for non-expert users to actually do. Secret Chats only works if your conversation partner happens to be online when you do this."
Update
Telegram has announced that it's removing the People Nearby feature that it said had "issues with bots and scammers" and disabling new media uploads to its standalone blogging tool, Telegraph, because it "seems to have been misused by anonymous actors."
"While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our almost billion users at risk," Durov said in a new post on Friday. "That’s why this year we are committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise."
The changes aim to reverse Telegram's notorious reputation as a hotspot for criminal activity, allowing drug trafficking, money laundering, and child pornography to flourish on the platform.
