Durov in Detention: The End of Tech Titan Immunity?

It was 10 years ago that Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the most popular Russian-speaking social media VKontakte (VK), modeled after Facebook, announced on April 16, 2014, that he had said “No” to the FSB by rejecting the Russian security service’s demand that he hand over the personal data of organizers of Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolutionary groups.  

“Delivery of personal data of Ukrainians to the Russian authorities would not have been only illegal, it would have been treason against all those millions of Ukrainians who trust us.” he wrote. He admitted that his decision would cost him control over his company — he was forced to sell his share in VK.

His second post, two hours later, said, “On March 13, 2014, the Prosecutor’s office requested that I shut the anticorruption group of Alexey Navalny. I didn’t close this group in December 2011, and I certainly won’t close it now. In recent weeks, I was under pressure from different angles. We managed to gain over a month, but it’s time to state this — neither myself, nor my team are going to conduct political censorship . . . Freedom of information is an inalienable right in post-industrial society.”

Five days later, Durov was fired as chief executive. Soon afterward, he left Russia and never returned.

That was how Durov, then a 29-year-old St-Petersburg-based IT entrepreneur, lost his first child, the Vkontakte social network, and his motherland. He later took French citizenship.

He retained his vision that Internet technologies could be a global and successful challenge to traditional national systems of control. And he kept his reputation — most Russians admired his bravery and his stand against the FSB. He also retained control over a new project his team had been working on for some time — Telegram messenger.

Telegram proved itself more creative than other messengers when it gave its users an option to run the channels — news feeds administered by the users. In countries where freedom of media was under attack from the governments, those channels became a substitute for news outlets, although not exactly — most popular channels were filled with half-news, half gossip, in some cases from known and trusted sources, but also from anonymous sources, who positioned themselves as insiders.

In Russia, both sides grabbed this new Telegram feature — pro-Kremlin bloggers used Telegram channels to spread propaganda and disinformation, while independent journalists and activists turned to Telegram to break through censorship. 

The messenger system gained popularity around the world, especially in countries with poor connectivity and authoritarian regimes, and there it became a competitor to Facebook’s WhatsApp messenger.

It put Durov at odds with an increasing number of governments: Russia banned Telegram for two years in 2018, while Iran blocked the app during the protests in 2017 and in 2018. Western governments, too, were upset because Telegram became increasingly popular among terrorist groups and all kinds of criminals. The service is accused of aiding money launderers, terrorists, extreme pornographers, and child abusers.

Durov maintained his public stance about privacy but secretly negotiated deals with governments that resulted in the lifting of bans and never revealed the terms.

For instance, we’re not sure exactly why the Kremlin lifted its ban on the messenger service in 2020. The Kremlin said Durov must not only ban “extremist content” but also wanted him to surrender Telegram’s encryption keys that would allow authorities to read private conversations. Telegram was unblocked in June 2020. Had Durov made some sort of deal with the FSB?  We don’t know.

Following the Kremlin’s unprecedented and existential offensive against independent media on the eve of the all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, most Russian journalists and opposition moved to Telegram, along with YouTube. Durov made no effort to block this, and nor did he raise a finger about the increasing presence of pro-Kremlin bloggers on the app.

When the full-scale war in Ukraine started, we launched a Telegram channel for our website Agentura.ru. The website was blocked by the Kremlin, but the channel was not. That story was repeated by many Russian independent media outlets, who are now in exile.

At the same time, the war gave a boost to pro-war bloggers, who enjoyed a massive following, which helped to mobilize public support for the war and crowd-fund for the Russian military.

As a result, Durov found himself under fire from all sides: the Kremlin demanded he block what it did not like, and Russian liberals criticized Telegram for providing a platform to warmongers. Human rights activists were meanwhile warning anti-war activists against using Telegram as a messenger because it was unclear whether the authorities had access to the system.

The unmediated mix of users, including two armies at war, reflects precisely Durov’s idea of freedom of expression. Everyone can have a say on social media, and there shouldn’t be any kind of control from any government.

His quasi-anarchic attitude seems to echo the ideology of the early hacker movement of the 1980s, but it isn’t a sustainable strategy today, when governments around the world are on the offensive against the free-for-all approach online. This bureaucratic counter-offensive has been efficient and successful.

First, the authorities recognized that behind even the most ambitious global platforms are human beings; and human beings can be put under all sorts of pressure. For example, in 2016, Brazilian authorities briefly detained Diego J. Dzodan, Facebook’s vice-president for Latin America, because WhatsApp had refused to share the messages of alleged drug dealers.

Next, the concept that big tech business tycoons were too eminent for even authoritarian states to tangle with was quietly abandoned, when, in 2020, Jack Ma, a high-profile Chinese billionaire and Alibaba founder, fell out with the authorities. His company’s stock market listing was suspended, and Ma disappeared from the public eye. Later, he reappeared in Japan as a visiting professor at Tokyo College. 

In retrospect, Durov was living a charmed existence in his Dubai-based exile. The tech attitudes of 2014 look hopelessly out of date 10 years later. Governments from the US to Europe and far beyond are rolling out more and more regulations for social media, from Facebook to TikTok.

No one — other perhaps than the tech titans themselves can really argue against evidence that unruly social media can cause a lot of damage. The time for unmoderated social media has long passed.

Quite how that happens is a question to be discussed. But at the far end of the spectrum, the nation-state has the ability to arrest those who refuse to cooperate. That is how the French decided to make Telegram cooperate with the country’s law enforcement agencies. Other tools are also available — in 2020, India banned 59 Chinese apps altogether.

But is government coercion the only way to enforce the rules?

Users are constantly presented with an alternative — either a dangerously chaotic social media or government control. But maybe there are other options.

Social media are an essential part of our societal fabric, and our society, through non-government organizations, or parliaments, and parliamentary hearings, are perfectly capable of creating mechanisms of control that do not include the arrests of CEOs for the lack of moderation.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists, and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.