How Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr

Hey Kaitlyn,

The arrest of Telegram's Pavel Durov is a significant event by any measure. Here, I try to break down some of what's going on, but there's still lots of unknowns.

-Jason

Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s arrest in France over the weekend has lit the internet on fire in a very specific and complicated way. Conservatives and free speech champions have called the arrest politically motivated, and an attack on encrypted messaging and free expression. 

There are too many unknowns at this moment to say for sure what’s going on here. But I’m going to attempt to explain why you’re seeing some of what you’re seeing about Telegram and what we do know about the messaging app.  

This segment is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, let's talk.

Online child sexual exploitation is on the rise, and parents, lawmakers, and platform leaders are working hard to solve this complex problem.

The challenge is that grooming isn’t like other online safety violations - it unfolds over time and across platforms, making it extremely difficult to detect at scale. At the same time, trust & safety teams are not equipped to manually review conversations to identify grooming, before it’s too late.

But scaled detection is possible. ActiveFence’s latest report unveils its approach to this complex task. I don’t want to give too much away, but the key lies in combining deep expertise in predatory behaviors, pattern recognition, and user-level moderation, among other strategies.

To learn more about ActiveFence's industry-leading approach, and how to detect and stop grooming on your platform - check out their report here.

According to a press release from the Tribunal Judiciaire De Paris, Durov was arrested following a preliminary investigation that started on July 8 and authorities are looking into charges of enabling illegal transactions, failure to provide documents to authorities, complicity in possessing child sexual abuse material and in distributing CSAM, complicity in the distribution of drugs, complicity in organized fraud, and money laundering. Notably, the investigation also covers “providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration, providing a cryptology tool not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration, and importing a cryptology tool ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.” 

We at 404 Media have seen and reported on much of the illegal activity on Telegram with our own eyes. Telegram is widely and blatantly used in the open by drug dealers who advertise their products on Facebook and Instagram, hackers who sell credit cards in public groups, hacking crews that have begun to commit physical violence against each other, widespread fraud rings, and people who make and sell nonconsensual, AI-generated sexual content of celebrities, ordinary people, and minors. 

Crucially, much of this content is not encrypted, because group chats on Telegram are not encrypted and because encryption is not enabled by default. It would be more accurate to call Telegram a messaging app on which a version of encryption can be enabled for certain chats if you want. It is not really an “encrypted messaging app.” Many of these devices and groups are advertised in the open, and many of these groups have thousands of users. In our experience, Telegram does very little to remove this sort of activity, and in many years of reporting on them, we can think of only one instance in which Telegram actually banned a group we sent to them. 

We don’t know enough about the specifics of what France is accusing Telegram of, or, frankly, about French encryption law to write substantively about this at the moment. But laws against encryption make us all less safe, which is why we have written repeatedly about the massive pitfalls of criminalizing encryption or requiring government backdoors in encrypted communication apps and in encrypted data more broadly. 

It can be simultaneously true that Pavel Durov has enabled some of the worst things on the internet via Telegram but that his arrest partially on the grounds of “providing cryptology services” should be more broadly concerning. Durov’s arrest is a major event any way you slice it. But just how big of a deal it is—and whether it bodes poorly for other social media networks, encrypted communications platforms, and the idea of global free speech—depends on the specifics of the case, which we still do not know (lawyer Preston Byrne has a good rundown on the stakes of this on his blog).

But this is a messy and complicated situation precisely because Telegram itself is a messy app, and Telegram has become a “political” app specifically because conservatives have recently decided to champion Telegram as part of a complicated culture war that really has nothing to do with Telegram at all. 

Conservatives in particular have, for culture war reasons, recently recommended Telegram—an “encrypted messaging” app that has many parts that are not encrypted and which does not have a clear governance structure—over Signal, an app that is open source and by all accounts uses one of the strongest encryption protocols ever created, on every chat that happens on the platform. Because conservatives have promoted Telegram recently, some of them now see Durov’s arrest as a particular crackdown on America’s right wing, free speech, and, possibly, a political incursion against the Russian government and military, both of which use Telegram. 

Elon Musk, David Sacks, Ian Miles Cheong, Tucker Carlson, etc have all spoken out about the arrest, saying things that vary between suggesting this is a concerning incursion against free speech to suggesting, in Cheong’s case that “this is nothing but a witch hunt, an attempt to clamp down on the last bastions of free communication. They're terrified of the truth getting out, so they label everything they can't control as 'terrorism' or 'hate speech'. It's the EU's latest move to strangle our right to speak freely, to share information without their Orwellian oversight. They're after him because Telegram doesn't bend the knee to their narrative control.” 

The quick version of how Telegram became a part of the culture war goes something like this. In April, Uri Berliner, who was then a senior business editor at NPR, alleged a widespread culture of woke at NPR in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press. This led to weeks of discussion about NPR on Twitter and in the right-wing blogosphere. During this saga, several right-wing bloggers attacked NPR’s current CEO and President Katherine Maher, who was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization that has been repeatedly attacked by conservatives, Elon Musk, etc. for allegedly having a liberal bias. Maher is also a member of the Signal Foundation’s board of directors. 

In the aftermath of Berliner’s departure from NPR, right-wing blogger Chris Rufo wrote an article called “Signal’s Katherine Maher Problem,” which attempted to paint Maher as an extreme leftist in part because she had tweeted about “structural privilege,” “non-binary people,” “late-state capitalism,” “toxic masculinity,” and supported Black Lives Matter, as well as a connection she had early in her career to the U.S. State Department. 

“What does this all mean for American users—including dissidents—who believe that Signal is a secure application for communication? It means that they should be cautious,” Rufo wrote. “For those who believe in a free and open Internet, Maher’s Signal role should be a flashing warning sign.” 

Rufo’s article went viral, and was shared by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin, and Elon Musk commented, “Yup, concerning.”  Musk then claimed without evidence that “there are known vulnerabilities with Signal that are not being addressed. Seems odd…” Musk’s tweet was refuted by X’s own Community Notes. 

Most importantly, Telegram’s Durov used Rufo’s blog post and the conservative energy behind it to promote Telegram as an alternative and made sweeping claims about the security of Signal without having anything to back it up: “A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly ‘secure’ messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad,” Durov wrote on his own Telegram channel. “An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their ‘private’ Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media ... for the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private.” 

Telegram was suddenly being championed by right wingers as a more ideologically sound (in their view) messaging app than Signal, and people who believed this began advocating for Telegram, despite the fact that the dominant view among security experts is that Signal is many orders of magnitude more secure and private than Telegram is for ordinary users. 

Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker responded at length to this saga, noting “you can hate Maher, or love her. But the point here is that Signal is built so that no one—her, or anyone—can fuck with it without being caught and called out. That’s our whole thing,” she tweeted. “We develop in the open, and leverage reproducible builds. A large community of infosec researchers closely scrutinizes every single update, combing through our repos and binaries.” 

Much of the criminal activity that happens on Telegram happens in the open, and, as I mentioned, the broader Telegram ecosystem is a mess. Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University, said as much in a blog post published Sunday. 

“If you want to use end-to-end encryption in Telegram, you must manually activate an optional end-to-end encryption feature called ‘Secret Chats’ for every single private conversation you want to have,” Green wrote. “The feature is explicitly not turned on for the vast majority of conversations.”

Through that lens, and through the lens of the fact that I can log onto Telegram right now and find dozens of chats where illegal things are happening, it is simplistic and reductive (and maybe wrong?) to say that Telegram is an “encrypted messaging app,” and it’s also reductive to say that Durov was arrested in France purely because he operates an “encrypted messaging app.”

“For plenty of people, Telegram is used more like a[n unencrypted] social media network than a private messenger,” Green wrote. Green’s whole post is worth reading, because it analyzes Telegram’s actual encryption protocol and he comes away with the conclusion, “If you ask me to guess whether the protocol and implementation of Telegram Secret Chats is secure, I would say quite possibly. To be honest though, it doesn’t matter how secure something is if people aren’t actually using it.” 

This is all to say nothing of the fact that we know incredibly little about Telegram the company, because Durov left Russia after it seized the social network VK, which he also founded, from him. Telegram is now domiciled in the British Virgin Islands and operates out of Dubai). Information about Telegram’s broader operations, its complicated relationship with the Russian government, what information it retains on its users, and what information could potentially be gleaned from it by law enforcement are still largely unknown, and the subject of much discussion among security researchers. We have spent many hours at 404 Media discussing amongst ourselves why there is so much crime on Telegram itself and why Telegram has continued to let blatant criminal organizations operate on its platform in open, unencrypted channels. The only theory that makes any sense thus far is that the company sees itself as operating entirely outside the law.

None of this necessarily means that Pavel Durov should have been arrested and, say, Mark Zuckerberg—whose platforms are also full of many of the things that are on Telegram—should not. (To be clear, I’m not saying either of them should be arrested). Durov’s arrest is still potentially very concerning and there are so many things we still don’t know. But conservatives in particular are so riled up about this in a very specific way because they see this as a chance to turn Durov into a martyr in the culture war.