MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A French court has indicted tech billionaire Pavel Durov on charges that he allowed a wide range of crimes to flourish on the messaging platform Telegram.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This is a case of interest to anybody who uses social media and of special interest if you happen to be one of the billionaires who own social media platforms. Durov is co-founder of this service. It's an app you download on your phone. You can send private, encrypted messages or talk on public channels. He's not accused of committing crimes himself but of running the platform where crimes took place and then of failing to cooperate with authorities. The charges followed Durov's surprise arrest, and they add to the debate about free speech and the internet.
MARTIN: Reporter Rebecca Rosman has been following the case. We caught up with her in London. Good morning, Rebecca.
REBECCA ROSMAN, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: Before we get into these charges, can you just tell us a little bit more about Telegram and its CEO?
ROSMAN: So the CEO Pavel Durov is someone who has long been seen as an antiestablishment figure. He was born in the then-Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. His first big social media company was actually a site called VK, which is Russia's answer to Facebook. He famously left Russia in 2014, though, after refusing to comply with the Kremlin's demands that he turn over information about the site's users. This is what prompted him to start Telegram, which he now runs from Dubai. And while it's less popular in the U.S., it has nearly a billion users worldwide and is especially popular in countries like Brazil, India, Russia and Ukraine. One thing that users find particularly attractive about the platform is its limited oversight of what users can say or do. But this has also made the app a favorite tool for far-right extremist groups, terrorist organizations and criminal gangs.
MARTIN: Is that what led to these charges?
ROSMAN: Yeah, more or less. So the Paris prosecutor's office announced a pretty wide range of charges yesterday evening, but they're mostly tied to allegations that Durov was complicit in the spread of all kinds of illegal activities on Telegram, so things like the spread of child sexual abuse materials, drug trafficking and money laundering.
French investigators say Durov failed to cooperate with them or provide information that would have helped them shut down these illegal operations. And he's now under judicial supervision and is banned from leaving French territory. He also had to post a bond of $5.5 million dollars and will be required to report to French police twice a week while he's under investigation. And if he's convicted, he could face up to a decade in prison. And I should say these charges are groundbreaking in the sense that this would certainly appear to be the harshest action any government has taken against a social media executive to date.
MARTIN: OK, France is not the only place where people are worried that these platforms are being used to commit crimes and also to spoke (ph) social division, which has actually led to violence in many places. But there are also the free-speech absolutists who consider rulemaking a form of censorship. And I take it we're hearing a lot of outrage from some of these folks, especially from other tech moguls.
ROSMAN: Right. And what these tech moguls say is that it is simply not their job to be policing these platforms and that forcing them to do so actually sets a dangerous precedent for free speech on the internet. A number of well-known individuals have spoken out against Durov's arrest. You have people like Elon Musk who posted the hashtag #FreePavel on his platform, X. But the French government has defended its actions, with even French President Emmanuel Macron himself taking to X earlier this week to write his country was, quote, "deeply committed to freedom of expression" but that in a state governed by the rule of law, things need to be upheld within a legal framework, whether that's in real life or on social media.
MARTIN: That is reporter Rebecca Rosman in London. Rebecca, thank you.
ROSMAN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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