Fraser Myers
In 2013, the Russian authorities searched the home and offices of social-media magnate Pavel Durov. He was alleged to have caused a traffic accident, although the raid was widely believed to be in retaliation for his platform’s persistent refusal to censor critics of the government. VK, Durov’s Russian-language competitor to Facebook, had consistently rejected the Kremlin’s demands to block the accounts of Putin’s domestic opponents and to hand over data belonging to protesters in Ukraine. In 2014, he sold his stake in VK, resigned as CEO, and fled his home country. Durov, a self-described libertarian, says he was not prepared to do the state’s bidding. Since he left, VK is now more or less controlled by the Kremlin.
More than a decade later and Durov is in trouble with the law again. His newer app, Telegram, is in the firing line this time. He was arrested and detained on Saturday and charged with 12 crimes, seemingly all in connection with Telegram’s failure to comply with the authorities’ requests to remove certain content. But Durov was not arrested in Russia this time. He was apprehended as his private jet touched down in France.
The 12 charges include ‘complicity’ in alleged crimes as diverse as child exploitation, fraud, drug trafficking, money laundering and terrorism. As despicable as such crimes may be, it is unprecedented for the authorities in a Western liberal democracy to hold a social-media platform and its founder criminally liable for content shared by others. The closest the authorities have come to doing this was in 2016 in Brazil, when a senior Facebook executive was arrested and briefly jailed after the company refused to hand over private WhatsApp data to assist in a drug-trafficking case. Back then, the decision to make the arrest was described by a judge as ‘hurried’, ‘unlawful’ and ‘extreme’, and was quickly overturned.
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