There are scant details on this story that broke late Saturday evening, but we’ll share what’s been reported on the founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, getting taken into custody at a French airport by government officials, on an arrest warrant accusing the website of failing to moderate content that was allegedly used in criminal activity.
via CNN:
French authorities have detained Pavel Durov, the French-Russian billionaire who founded the messaging app Telegram, at an airport outside Paris, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV.
Officers from France’s anti-fraud office, attached to French customs, took him into custody Saturday evening after he arrived at Bourget Airport on a flight from Azerbaijan, BFMTV reported.
Durov, 39, was wanted under a French arrest warrant due to the lack of moderation on Telegram which led to it being used for money laundering, drug trafficking and sharing pedophilic content, according to BFMTV.
According to BFMTV, the Telegram founder had not regularly travelled to France and Europe since the arrest warrant was issued.
At the time of this writing, there was no comment from the French prosecutor’s office to CNN.
X owner Elon Musk reacted to the news by sharing an X post on the CEO being detained, writing a prediction about the future of social media: “POV: It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme.”
Then Musk asked Grok, the AI for X’s paid platform users, for its “thoughts”:
Check out this ad for the First Amendment. It is very convincing.
https://t.co/mb4UCSZcgR— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2024
If you can’t see the post, it shows a summary of media reports on the arrest, with Musk writing above it:
Check out this ad for the First Amendment. It is very convincing.
As this is a developing story, RedState will provide more details as they become available.
