Pavel Durov, founder of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, was arrested as he deboarded his private jet outside Paris this week. French authorities charged Durov (who was born in the USSR, but became a naturalized French citizen in 2021) with a wide range of charges including the circulation of child pornography on the platform, and Telegram's use in drug trafficking.

Telegram is one of the most widely-used social media platforms on Earth, and its encrypted messaging feature is a core service of the app.

Still, holding a social network's founder criminally liable for what its nearly one billion users do on the platform seems counter to how we've come to understand the Internet in recent years.

“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” Telegram said in a statement following Durov's arrest, reports NPR. The company added that it is compliant with EU laws.

But Laure Beccuau, the French prosecutor on the case, pushed back on these claims saying that Telegram's near total refusal to cooperate in the investigation led "to open an investigation into the possible criminal responsibility of the messaging app's executives in the commission of these offenses," writes Ars Technica. In fact, Beccuau noted that authorities in other countries around the EU “have shared the same observation,” which led prosecutors to open an investigation in February into the “potential criminal liability of executives at this messaging platform," writes the New York Times.

This, of course, seems to separate Telegram from platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter who regularly cooperate with most authorities around the world when they investigate illegal activities on their platforms.

“I continue to assume that the reason they can indict is because Telegram forfeited their immunity by not taking down things they were notified about. …If that’s true, this indictment seems like a not-surprising next step," Daphne Keller, a professor of internet law at Stanford Law, told the New York Times.

But Daniel Lyons at Boston College Law School, noted that “As a C.E.O., seeing that you are personally put at risk, I’m going to have much lower tolerance for speech and transactions at the margins. …It would at least make me question where I’m traveling and why.”

Section 230

In the United States, Section 230 (a section added to the Communications Act of 1934 by the Telecommunications Act of 1996) has been frequently applied to protect social media platforms and other Internet companies from being held liable for the content on their platforms.

According to the National Law Review, "Section 230 has been widely acknowledged as instrumental in allowing the modern web and e-commerce to flourish. However, many critics in Congress and elsewhere have assailed certain content promotion and moderation practices online that allowed undesirable and fraudulent content to maintain a presence on the web and have pointed to some well-reported instances of harmful online behavior…CDA detractors have recently argued that the line between service provider and content creator has blurred in some cases when providers use algorithms that recommend or repackage content for users, conflating third party content and first party contribution."

In recent years, efforts to sunset the law have failed to pass final votes, though calls for its reform are increasing.

Verdict

Will Durov's case be the blow to immunity online platforms have enjoy for decades, or is his case unique? Time will tell, but it seems clear that executives will be more cautious with where they travel and how they interact with investigations and legal authorities moving forward.