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Pavel Durov

Founder and CEO, Telegram Messenger (Telegram FZ-LLC / Telegram Group Inc.)

Search every verified Pavel Durov interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, has spoken at the Oslo Freedom Forum and other events about what he describes as the erosion of personal freedoms in Western countries. He has argued that governments in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the European Commission are using child protection as a pretext for measures that he says are actually aimed at controlling political speech online. Durov cited a submission by the British government to the High Court of England, which he quoted as stating that the "main part of the Online Safety Act was aimed at capturing large platforms with significant influence over public discourse." He also claimed that thousands of people are arrested annually in the UK for social media posts and that in Germany, insulting a politician online can lead to a prison sentence of up to three years. Durov has also discussed his own detention in Paris, where he said he was interrogated for nearly three days. He recounted that a translator present during the interrogation told him she felt "like the Soviet Union is catching up with me." He has warned that with the rise of AI, if privacy rights are surrendered, "every message that you send will be monitored, will be analyzed, every draft, every thought, every idea will be scored, every relationship will be mapped." Durov has further argued that government attempts to ban Telegram in Russia and Iran failed, as the majority of the population in those countries still uses the platform via VPNs, and he suggested that forcing teenagers to use VPNs exposes them to greater dangers.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“For the last 20 years, we've been gradually losing our digital freedoms. And not just in countries like China or Iran or Russia that seem to build their own version of internet and ban the global internet, but also in countries that traditionally were free and are now trying to ban your right to privacy, limit your freedom of speech.”

“I think overabundance paralyzes motivation and willpower. It's extremely harmful, particularly for young boys, to grow up in an environment where they can be proud not of their own achievements but of their father's achievements, of their father's wealth. This removes the incentive to work on developing their own skills, removes the incentive to study, to work. So I thought if they're going to have this money, it sho”

“The truthful answer to this question is I don't really know how many biological kids I have exactly because at a certain point in my life about 15 years ago I decided that it was a good idea to be a sperm donor. Initially a friend of mine asked me to help because they were trying to have a baby with his wife and uh they experienced certain health issues with that prevented them to do it the natural way and he asked m”

“But what does the system do to them? It squeezes them out because you perhaps there was somebody in the tax authority that decided to advance their career and perhaps you know was too ambitious and not too smart. So as a result the company was destroyed.”

“I think the European society must decide where they want the everincreasing public sector to stop increasing, what they think should be the right size of government. Because today if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP. It's maybe as much or more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.”

“European countries trying to fight freedom of speech under pretexts that sound legitimate such as combating misinformation or election interference. They create precedents and they legitimize restrictions to freedom of speech which then in turn be used by authoritarian regimes and they would say in places like China or Iran that they're not doing anything different.”

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