Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has lashed out at French authorities, judging his recent arrest over an alleged lack of moderation on the messaging app as "misguided" and "surprising".
In his first public comments since he was detained last month, Durov denied claims that the app is "some sort of anarchic paradise" as "absolutely untrue".
In his statement, published on the Telegram app late Thursday, Durov said that French authorities should have approached his company with their complaints rather than detaining him.
Durov, a French citizen, was arrested on 25 August at an airport north of Paris. He's been formally charged on several counts of failing to curb extremist and illegal content on the popular messaging app - including drug trafficking, fraud and the spread of child pornography.
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'Surprising' arrest
The Russian-born billionaire said the investigation into the app was surprising since French authorities had access to a "hot line" that he had helped set up and they could have contacted Telegram's EU representative at any time.
"If a country is unhappy with an Internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself," he wrote.
"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."
"Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools," he said.
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Room for improvement
While he admitted Telegram was not perfect, he denied any abuse associated with the app.
"But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue," he wrote. "We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day."
Telegram allows groups of up to 200,000 members. Critics argue this makes it easier to spread misinformation and for users to share for example paedophilic, conspirationist or terror-related content.
In his statement, Durov admitted that an "abrupt increase" in the number of Telegram users - around 950 million at present - had "caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform".
He aimed to "significantly improve things in this regard".
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(with newswires)
