The detainment of the murky messaging service’s founder in France shows online
moguls can no longer act with impunity
On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget
airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French judicial
police were waiting for him. He was duly arrested and whisked away for
interrogation. Four days later he was indicted on 12 charges, including alleged
complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug
trafficking, barred from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision”,
which requires him to check in with the gendarmes twice a week until further
notice.
The mogul in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects
nationalities the way others collect air miles. In fact it turns out that one of
his citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by France’s president,
Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a punishing
daily regime. “After eight hours of tracked sleep,” the Financial Times reports,
“he starts the day ‘without exception’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice
bath. He does not drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and saves time for
meditation.” When not engaged in these demanding activities, he has also found
time to father more than 100 kids as a sperm donor and to rival Elon Musk as a
free-speech extremist.
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Tag - France
Pavel Durov said the feature – which has had issues with bots and scammers –
would be replaced
The chief executive of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has announced the messaging app
will improve moderation on the platform and has removed some features that have
been used for illegal activity.
The app’s founder unveiled the changes on Friday hours after calling his arrest
by the French authorities last month “misguided”. Durov has since been charged
with allegedly allowing criminal activity on the app.
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Russian-born billionaire detained last month in France denies app is ‘anarchic
paradise’
The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, under investigation in
France, has said that French authorities should have approached his company with
their complaints rather than detaining him, calling the arrest ‘“misguided”.
Durov, writing on his Telegram channel early on Friday in his first public
comments since his detention last month, denied any suggestion the app was an
“anarchic paradise”.
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In isolation, Alexander Grothendieck seemed to have lost touch with reality, but
some say his metaphysical theories could contain wonders
One day in September 2014, in a hamlet in the French Pyrenean foothills,
Jean-Claude, a landscape gardener in his late 50s, was surprised to see his
neighbour at the gate. He hadn’t spoken to the 86-year-old in nearly 15 years
after a dispute over a climbing rose that Jean-Claude had wanted to prune. The
old man lived in total seclusion, tending to his garden in the djellaba he
always wore, writing by night, heeding no one. Now, the long-bearded seeker
looked troubled.
“Would you do me a favour?” he asked Jean-Claude.
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Pavel Durov will probably use French legal disputes to position himself as a
champion of free speech, say observers
When Pavel Durov came under criticism from Russian regulators over the spread of
pornography on the VKontakte social media platform he founded, the tech
entrepreneur responded mockingly by changing his Twitter handle from “VK CEO” to
“Porn King”.
More than a decade later, Durov’s anti-authoritarian stance and hands-off
approach to moderation have landed him in more serious trouble.
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On Saturday 24 April, the billionaire founder of the Telegram social media and
messaging app, Pavel Durov, was arrested by French authorities as he disembarked
from his private jet in Paris on his way from Azerbaijan. Officials said the
arrest was part of a cybercrime inquiry into criminal activity on the platform
and a lack of cooperation with law enforcement. Durov has since been formally
charged.
Durov, also known as the 'Russian Mark Zuckerberg' for having founded a similar
platform to Zuckerberg’s Facebook in Russia called VKontakte, is a self-styled
champion of free speech and has cultivated a reputation for being unwilling to
work with authorities to censor and more closely control what happens on his
platform. But his arrest has raised important questions about the extent to
which tech executives are responsible for how users employ their social media
networks. Chris Stokel-Walker, a technology journalist, explains the
implications of Durov's arrest for the tech sector
* Telegram CEO charged in France for ‘allowing criminal activity’ on messaging
app
* What the Telegram founder’s arrest means for the regulation of social media
firms
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Pavel Durov, who has French citizenship, faces prosecution over alleged failure
to suppress spread of sexual images of children and calls for violence
The head of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been charged by the French judiciary for
allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app but avoided jail with
a €5m bail.
The Russian-born multi-billionaire, who has French citizenship, was granted
release on condition that he report to a police station twice a week and remain
in France, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement.
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Once nicknamed the ‘Russian Zuckerberg’, Durov has boasted of being the
biological father of more than 100 children
The Russian-born tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov has founded wildly popular social
networks as well as a cryptocurrency, amassed a multibillion dollar fortune and
locked horns with authorities in Russia and around the world.
Still a few months shy of his 40th birthday, the man once nicknamed the “Russian
Zuckerberg” after the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg now finds himself under
arrest in France after being detained at a Paris airport this weekend.
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Billionaire CEO, who was travelling aboard his private jet, was subject of
arrest warrant, according to TV reports
Pavel Durov, billionaire co-founder and chief executive of the Telegram
messaging app, was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday
evening, TF1 TV said, citing an unnamed source.
Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he
had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France.
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The 35-nation Iter project has a groundbreaking aim to create clean and
limitless energy but it is turning into the ‘most delayed and cost-inflated
science project in history’
It was a project that promised the sun. Researchers would use the world’s most
advanced technology to design a machine that could generate atomic fusion, the
process that drives the stars – and so create a source of cheap, non-polluting
power.
That was initially the aim of the International Thermonuclear Experimental
Reactor (Iter) which 35 countries – including European states, China, Russia and
the US – agreed to build at Saint-Paul-lez-Durance in southern France at a
starting cost of $6bn. Work began in 2010, with a commitment that there would be
energy-producing reactions by 2020.
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