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A month after French authorities charged him with enabling drug trafficking and child abuse on his platform, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced Monday that the popular messaging app has taken several steps to weed out illegal material.
In a significant reversal, the company changed its policies, and it will now turn over Telegram user IP addresses and phone numbers to law enforcement agencies in response to valid legal requests. Prior to Durov’s arrest, the company’s FAQ page said: “All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them.”
In a post on Telegram, first reported by Bloomberg, Durov said that a team of moderators has spent the last several weeks removing unsafe and illegal content. Telegram also updated the platform’s search function to make it less likely to turn up such material.
“These measures should discourage criminals,” Durov wrote. “Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods. We won’t let bad actors jeopardize the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.”
Durov, who is a French citizen, was arrested on August 28 after landing in his private jet at an airport outside Paris after a trip to Azerbaijan.
French prosecutors charged him with facilitating the distribution of child sexual abuse material, organized fraud, and association with criminals to commit crimes. The prosecutors’ press release also alleged that Telegram failed to share information with police about illegal activity on the platform. The governments of Iran and Russia have previously banned the app for refusing to turn over information to authorities, although Russia later reversed the ban.
In the days after Durov’s arrest, Telegram said its founder had nothing to hide and that it was “absurd” to hold the company or its owner responsible for users who violated the platform’s policies.
In an earlier public statement, Durov said, “French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance,” including a dedicated email address for European law enforcement requests. But he acknowledged that the platform’s rapid expansion—it boasts around 950 million users—had caused “growing pains.”
In the weeks since Durov’s arrest, Telegram has made several changes to the platform in addition to the new policy governing law enforcement requests. It removed the People Nearby feature, which showed a list of other users in close proximity, and disabled media uploads to Telegraph, the company’s blogging platform, which “seems to have been used by anonymous actors,” Durov said.
