❤️Thank you everyone for your support and love!
Last month, I was questioned by the police for four days after arriving in Paris. I was told that I could be personally responsible for someone else’s illegal use of Telegram, since the French authorities had not heard back from Telegram.
This is surprising for several reasons:
1. Telegram has an official representative in the EU who is responsible for accepting and responding to EU requests. Its email address is public and can be obtained by anyone in the EU simply by searching Google for “Telegram EU law enforcement address.”
2. The French authorities have several ways to contact me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I am a regular visitor to the French Consulate in Dubai. Not long ago, upon request, I personally helped them set up a hotline with Telegram to deal with the terrorist threat in France.
3. If a country is dissatisfied with an online service, it is common practice to initiate legal proceedings against the service itself. It is misleading to use laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with third-party crimes committed on the platforms he manages. Building technology is hard enough on its own. Innovators would not develop new tools if they knew they could be personally responsible for their potential misuse.
Establishing the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You must align privacy laws with law enforcement requirements and local laws with EU law. You have to consider technical limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent globally while ensuring they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We remain committed to working with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles: our experience is shaped by our mission to protect users in authoritarian regimes. But we’re always open to dialogue.
Sometimes we are unable to reach agreement with a country’s regulator on the appropriate balance between privacy and security. In this case, we are ready to leave that country. We’ve done it many times. When Russia asked us to hand over our “encryption keys” for surveillance, we refused and Telegram was banned in Russia. When Iran asked us to block access to peaceful protesters, we refused – Telegram is banned in Iran. We are prepared to leave markets that do not align with our principles because we are not doing it for the money. We are driven by delivering benefits to people and defending their fundamental rights, especially where these rights are violated.
None of this means Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities may be confused about where to send requests is something we should improve on. But the claims made by some media outlets that Telegram is some kind of anarchist paradise are absolutely untrue. We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this one or this one ). We have established a direct hotline with NGOs to handle urgent review requests more quickly.
However, we hear some voices saying that this is not enough. Telegram’s sudden increase in user numbers to 950 million has created growing pains for criminals, making it easier for them to abuse our platform. That’s why I’ve made it my personal goal to ensure we make significant improvements in this area. We have started this process internally and I will share more details about our progress with you soon.
I hope the events of August will make Telegram and the entire social networking industry safer and stronger. Thank you again for your love and expressions 🙏
