Telegram messaging app founder Pavel Durov, who is under investigation in France, said French authorities should have contacted his company with their complaints instead of arresting him, calling the arrest “wrong.”
Durov, writing on his Telegram channel early Friday in his first public comments since his arrest last month, denied any suggestion that the app was a “lawless paradise.”
The Russian-born billionaire said the investigation into the app was surprising because French authorities had access to a “hotline” he had helped set up and could have contacted Telegram’s EU representative at any time.
“If a country is dissatisfied with an Internet service, the established practice is to take legal action against the service itself,” he wrote.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to accuse a CEO of crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is the wrong approach.”
Telegram, he said, is not perfect, but he denied any abuse associated with the app.
“But claims by some media outlets that Telegram is some kind of lawless paradise are absolutely false,” he wrote. “We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day.”
Durov, now a French citizen, was arrested late last month in France amid an investigation into crimes related to child sexual abuse images, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions associated with the app.
The French judge has accused him of allegedly enabling criminal activity on the messaging app, but he has avoided jail before the trial thanks to a €5 million bail. He was released on condition that he reports to a police station twice a week and stays in France.
The charges against Durov include complicity in the dissemination of sexual images of children and a litany of other alleged violations on the messaging app.
His surprise arrest has highlighted the criminal liability of Telegram, the popular app with around one billion users, and sparked a debate about free speech and government censorship.
Reuters contributed to this report