French authorities have arrested Pavel Durov, the Russian-French billionaire founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app at the Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday.
Durov who had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website.
Investigation was focused on the absence of moderation on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on unchecked on the messaging app.
With close to one billion users, the encrypted Telegram is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union.
It is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Tiktok, WeChat, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The French Interior Ministry and police are yet to make an official statement.
Russian-born Durov founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he traded.
“I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone,” Durov told U.S. journalist Tucker Carlson in April about his exit from Russia and search for a home for his company which included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.
Telegram became the main source of unfiltered – and sometimes graphic and misleading content after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Both sides shared content about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict, making the platform ‘a virtual battlefield’ for the war, used heavily by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his officials, as well as the Russian government.
Telegram – which allows users to evade official scrutiny – has also become one of the few places where Russians can access independent news about the war after the Kremlin increased curbs on independent media following its invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian foreign ministry said its embassy in Paris was clarifying the situation around Durov and called on Western non-governmental organisations to demand his release.
Russia began blocking Telegram in 2018 after the app refused to comply with a court order to grant state security services access to its users’ encrypted messages.
The action interrupted many third-party services, but had little effect on the availability of Telegram there. The ban order, however, sparked mass protests in Moscow and criticism from NGOs.
Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said some governments had sought to pressure him but the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”.
Telegram’s increasing popularity, however, has prompted scrutiny from several countries in Europe, including France, on security and data breach concerns.