Pavel Durov in Conversation with Thor Halvorssen

Thank you. And thank you for the goat.

Well, I am Russian, and I would rather die than become anyone's asset. And I think people who expressed this view have very limited knowledge of my life story, and what I did before Telegram, what I did with Telegram, and the role my previous company VK, and Telegram played in defending freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and privacy in Eastern Europe. So just to give a very short recap for people who are maybe not familiar with my biography: I started what became the largest social network in Russia and the post-Soviet states, back in 2006. And I publicly refused to comply with certain demands coming from the Russian authorities when they contradicted the values of freedom of speech and the values of people's right to privacy. And this is very well documented. And as a result of that, I had my apartment raided. I had my office raided. I had criminal investigations launched against me. I ended up losing the company I created. I had to sell it at below market price. And eventually, you know, I started Telegram, which also became very popular in Russia by 2017, 2018, at which point Russia demanded the encryption keys and we refused to comply because we believe that people shouldn't be surveilled. And then we started this anti-censorship platform, this movement called Digital Resistance. And we have been defending the right of the people for free expression in that region, in any other region. So I don't think any other social media platform has spent so much effort and so much money in protecting freedoms in Eastern Europe. And I find it extremely offending, you know, when people say, 'Oh, you're a Russian asset.'

Well, I think one of the reasons could be is that people tend to view freedom of speech in a one-sided way. They love you when you protect their political allies and the voices that they agree with. Whereas when you also protect their political rivals, they tend to hate that. And particularly today in Europe, when the political debate is so heated, and politicians love to dismiss all criticism coming their direction as some Russian fake news or some plot coming from Russia, which is, by the way, a tool taken from the authoritarian playbook. But when they do that, myself and Telegram as a platform that protects all free speech, regardless of whether we agree with it or not, we also become criticized. But we have a pretty straightforward track record of defending everybody, regardless of their views. During COVID, we protected equally Black Lives Matter movements and, for example, protests against lockdowns. I'll give you the most recent example. We received a demand from the French police to shut down a channel, a public channel on Telegram, which was organized by far-left protesters and demonstrators. And we looked at this channel. It seemed completely legitimate. And we refused to comply, despite, you know, obvious personal risk I'm taking with these decisions. And the reason we refused to comply is not because we agree with the ideas of communism, right?

Where do I start? I was born in 1994. And by age 4 and 5, I was brought to Italy so I could experience both systems: the free market, free speech system, and the planned economy, restricted speech system. And even as a 4 or 5-year-old boy, I could already see the difference. So, to give you the most obvious example, like we arrived to Italy, I instantly discover I have dozens of TV channels with great cartoons, and I have hundreds of ice cream kinds. Whereas in the late Soviet Union, we just had a few TV channels showing often the same stuff about the Communist Party. And I remember we had two or three kinds of ice cream.

Oh, I remember we had Eskimo, we had plum beer, and we have this thing called Pchelka. I'm not sure you're familiar with that?

So, it started in December 2011, when I publicly refused to comply with an order from the prosecutor's office in Russia to shut down the opposition. A group of people were protesting in the streets of Moscow, hundreds of thousands of people. And I received this demand to shut down the communities on VK, the company I was running, and I refused to do that, but I also made fun of it. So, I published the scan of their request and I also added a photo of a dog in a hoodie with its tongue out and said, 'This is my official response to the prosecutor's office when it comes to blocking these channels.' So, I refused to do that and it was funny, but then it stopped being funny when I realized there's armed policemen storming my apartment and I don't know what to do. And I decided I need to get in touch with my brother and with my team. And I instantly realized, there's no way to do that because back at the time, everything was monitored. Everything was, well, even WhatsApp that claims now they protect privacy. And they started to add encryption only after Telegram was launched. Before that, they were sending messages in plain text. It was easily surveillable. So, I didn't have a tool. And I started to create Telegram to solve that problem. But then by 2013, after Edward Snowden's revelations, we realized that it's actually a global thing and we better launch it. We launched Telegram in 2013, and without any marketing effort, it instantly started to be popular in places where privacy is at risk and people's freedoms are limited.

I think Telegram was very impactful when it comes to defending the right of people to protest and assemble in regions where there are limitations of the freedoms. In China, for example, or let's say in Hong Kong, first, we were used very extensively by the protesters, and we knew it was efficient. We knew it was impactful because China started one of the largest DDoS attacks in the history of Internet services against Telegram. And we were barely available to our users because it was so powerful. So you could say China was really, really upset with it. So, I think it was sort of a badge of honor that we received from the Chinese government at that point. But we, you know, we tried to be protective of people all over the world. In Belarus, when the protest started, several years ago, we refused to censor any voices of dissenters. We actually sent a poll to every user in Belarus asking them to vote for, to choose the candidate they voted for in the presidential election. Because back then, people were upset that the results of the elections were rigged and they were falsified. And we had a lot of users in Belarus who, we thought, let's check whether the results were indeed falsified. And it was quite interesting that the results really were very different from the official numbers.

Yeah. So, I was indeed, very surprisingly, very unexpectedly detained for four days in Paris last year. And I was accused of being complicit in the crimes of people that use Telegram, and of people I have never heard about and never communicated with. And just by being the creator of this app, I was accused in all kinds of crimes being perpetrated by our users. And, you know, we have a billion users. So, we are bound to have statistically some people who will use Telegram for nefarious purposes. That was extremely strange. It was unparalleled and unprecedented in the Western world to have a CEO of a large super popular platform, like Telegram, being detained. It was even more surprising that, you know, we complied with all the binding legal requests we received. So, up until this day, we don't understand what we did wrong. We processed all the requests that were directed to us in accordance with the European and international law. It's actually the opposite that some of the French authorities or the French police decided not to use these tools. And it was even more surprising that I'm a French citizen, right? So, my personal address, where I could be reached, if anything is wrong, if there's any problem with communication with Telegram, I could have been reached. My address was known to the authorities of France. Actually, it's even more funny because my personal office in Dubai and the French consulate are in the same building. They're two floors apart. And I was a frequent visitor to the consulate. I also had regular meetings with officials representing the French government. I was in touch with them on Telegram. So, we were so surprised that, despite all these open lines of communication, when everything could have been solved, if there was ever any issue, could have been solved very easily, I was unexpectedly detained in Paris, and this investigation has been ongoing since then. And it's going on frustratingly slow.

Well, I can only theorize about what the reasons that I was selected are. I seem to be held at higher standards than most other platforms. We actually made some research. We compared Telegram with Instagram, with Facebook, with Snapchat, with other platforms here in France, and it seems that everybody has the same issues. With Telegram is actually more efficient in terms of moderation than all of these platforms. And you're right. You can accuse everybody in the same things that we were accused of. So, we're quite puzzled. The reasons, I don't know, maybe it's because we're the only non-US company. You know, we are not protected by this big American government that is very powerful. I'm not quite sure.