Telegram CEO Pavel Durov pledges crackdown on illegal activity and better content moderation

Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of the popular messaging app Telegram, told an initial court hearing in December that the platform was taking steps to improve its content moderation and to crackdown on illegal activity, radio station France Info has revealed.

Telegram deletes between 15 million and 20 million accounts it suspects of involvement in criminal activity each month, Durov told the hearing on 6 December, the details of which emerged on Friday.

Durov also told judges that Telegram had actively cooperated with law enforcement and had handed over the data of 10,000 of its users to the authorities in a number of countries over the past six months. “Telegram was not created to be a platform for criminals," Durov stressed, adding that he was “disgusted in a personal capacity” by the activity, according to HuffPost.

The judges noted the recent uptick in criminality on the app in the past few years, however, with 2,000 criminal cases opened in France into offences committed or organised on Telegram between 2017 and 2024, 535 of which were in the first five months of 2024 alone.

Durov was detained at Paris’s Le Bourget Airport in late August and charged with administering a platform where illicit financial transactions were carried out, for failure to provide information to the authorities concerning people being sought by the law, complicity in the distribution of child pornography, drug trafficking, organised crime and conspiracy to commit crimes, money laundering, and offering encryption services without the required legal permits.

Durov, who denies the charges against him, was eventually freed after posting a €5-million bail bond, though he was forced to surrender his passport and has been prohibited from leaving France.