I'd love to talk to you about the recent saga of you being arrested in August of last year in France. I think I should say that it's one of the worst overreaches of power I've seen as applied to a tech leader in recent history, in all history. So, maybe can you tell the full saga? What happened?
I arrived in France last year in August just for a short two-day trip. And then I see a dozen of armed policemen greeting me and ask me to follow them. They read me a list of something like 15 serious crimes that I'm accused of, which was mindboggling. At first I thought there must be some mistake. Then I realized they're being serious and they're accusing me of all possible crimes that the users of Telegram have allegedly committed, and they think I should be responsible for this. Which again, like you said, is something that never happened in the history of this planet. No country, not even an authoritarian one, did that to any tech leader, at least at this scale. There are good reasons for that, because you're sacrificing a big part of your economic growth by sending this kind of message to the business and tech community. So they put me in a police car and I found myself in police custody. A small room, no windows, just a narrow bed made of concrete. I spent almost four days there. In the process, I had to answer some questions of the policemen. They were interested in how Telegram operates. Most of it is public anyway. And I was struck by the very limited understanding, or should I say even lack of understanding, on behalf of the people who initiated this investigation against me about how technology works, how encryption works, how social media work. I mean, there's something darkly poetic about a tech founder of a platform where a billion people are communicating with each other and you're on concrete, no pillow for days, no windows. It's like a book. It reminds me, I'm a huge fan of Franz Kafka, and he wrote about the absurdity of these kinds of situations, hence the Kafkaesque stories. There's a story literally about this situation that he wrote, perhaps predicted, called 'The Trial,' where a person is arrested for no reason that anybody can explain and is stuck in the judicial system for a long time. Nobody, fascinatingly, in that story, neither the person arrested nor any individual member of the system itself, fully understands what is happening. Nobody can truly answer the questions, and eventually the person, spoiler alert, is mentally broken by the whole system, which is what bureaucracy can do in its most absurd form: it breaks the spirit, the human spirit laden in all of us. That's the negative side of bureaucracy. I agree with you on the absurdity of this thing, because if this was a good faith attempt to fix an issue, there were so many ways to reach out to Telegram, to reach out to me personally, voice their concerns, and solve any alleged problem in a way that is conventional and diplomatic, the way every other country on this planet solves its problems, including with Telegram, and we did it dozens of times.
Yeah. They have a nice page showing this, kind of like details that most people don't really think about. But Telegram is at the forefront of moderating CSAM and terrorist groups. There's a nice page, telegram.org/moderation, that shows just the incredible amount of groups and channels that are engaged in terrorist activity and CSAM activity that are actively blocked, found and blocked by Telegram. And a lot of this work, like you said, because of the automation, is done with machine learning. The scale is insane. This is stuff that most noobs like me who are just chatting it up on Telegram don't think about. But there's just an immense number of people essentially doing things that violate the law on there, and you have to find them immediately and catch it. I guess all platforms have to deal with it, and Telegram was doing a great job of dealing with that kind of content. And what you're saying is the French government had no idea.
It's a concept that is challenging to explain to them, but I think they will learn much more about it by the end of this investigation. That's my hope. In any case, you're right. If you look at Telegram, we've been fighting harmful content that is publicly distributed on our platform since 10 years ago. Actually, since the time we launched public channels on Telegram, and since something like eight years ago, we had daily transparency reports on how many channels related to child abuse or terrorist propaganda we take down daily. Every day we would take down maybe hundreds of them. And if you include all kinds of content that we remove, all the accounts, groups, channels, posts, that would amount to millions of pieces of content every week, hundreds of thousands every day. And then somebody would read the newspaper, get enraged because they would read something about child porn, and this is a subject that is very emotionally charged, and start doing something not based on data and logical thinking and laws, but based on emotions driven from inaccurate input.
Yeah, I think we should make pretty clear that there's no world, no reason that the French government should have arrested you, but here we are. That's the situation you're in. So, to be clear, you have to show up in front of a judge. All of this is beautifully absurd. It would be hilarious if it wasn't extremely serious. You have to show up in front of a judge every certain amount of time. And what is that experience like? In France, they have this role of investigative judge. I don't think you have it in many other places in the world. It means I'm not on trial, I'm being investigated. And in France, it's not just the police or prosecutor asking me questions, it's a judge, which in my experience is more like still a prosecutor, but it's called a judge. And that makes it harder to appeal. So if you're limited in say countries where you can travel, then to appeal that restriction will take you a lot of time. The investigation itself should have never been started. It's an absurd and harmful way of solving an issue as complicated as regulating social media. It's just the wrong tool. So we objected and appealed the investigation itself. We did last year, I believe, and we are still not even given a hearing date for the appeal, because the process is painfully slow, not just for me but for everybody, which made me realize the system may be broken on many levels. You have other entrepreneurs affected by the French justice system telling me horror stories about their experiences, where businesses got paralyzed by very unnecessary actions of investigative judges that ended up being unjustified and biased. And in the end you can perhaps solve it when you reach a higher court and you'll get justice, but you'll lose a lot of time and energy in the process. So this is the only thing that I hope will be different in this case compared to the story you told from Kafka. I mean, it does, as Kafka describes, break a lot of people with time. So, when do you hope, we should say that you were for a long time not allowed to travel out of France, now you can travel to Dubai. We're now in Dubai. Got to meet many of the people that work at Telegram. Telegram is headquartered in Dubai, but you're not allowed to travel anywhere else. When do you think you're coming to Texas to hang out with me over there?
That's a hard question to answer because it doesn't depend on just my actions. I can just say this: I am patient. I will not let this limitation on my freedom dictate my actions. I will, if anything, double down on defending freedoms because I experienced firsthand what the absence of freedom feels like, at least during these four days in police custody when you're just stuck, unable to communicate with people that are important to you, when you don't even know what's going on in the world in relation to you personally. So, I have no crystal ball that would tell me the future. I can't say that I'm pessimistic. I think we've been able to gradually remove most of the restrictions initially imposed on my freedom last August.
If the French government or the French intelligence agency want to have a back door or a way to access private user messages, what would you say to them? Is there anything they can do to get access to the private user messages?
Nothing. My response would be very clear, but it won't be very polite. So I'm not sure it's good to say here.
It's good to say because you're wearing a tie and...
