The 39-year-old’s arrest is one of the first cases in which the CEO of a major online platform has been held personally and criminally liable for the content hosted there. Telegram’s function as a secure, encrypted messaging service, combined with the company’s aversion to content moderation, made it a breeding ground for the illegal behavior alleged by French prosecutors, legal experts said.

Other online platforms and social media companies may have faced similar challenges as unsavory, even illegal, activity took place on their platforms, but never to the extent that Telegram did, says Megan Squire, deputy director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which studies online extremism. “Telegram is an outlier in many ways,” she said.

Telegram operates differently than other platforms because it has little content moderation and a reputation for not cooperating with law enforcement and regulators. Durov has stated that material depicting sexual assault on children and calls for violence are banned on Telegram.

Online extremist groups “enjoy the lack of content moderation,” says Squire, who uses software to track 30,000 extremist groups on Telegram. “It’s kind of a free-for-all.”

Durov’s arrest and the crackdown on Telegram appeared to shake what has often been seen as a cornerstone of online regulation: platforms are not publishers. The idea behind this distinction is to protect platforms from being held responsible for illegal things that happen on their platform without their knowledge. But it also means that platforms have a responsibility to take action to stop violations of the law as soon as they become aware of them, according to Alan Walter, a technology lawyer at Paris-based law firm Walter-Billet. This is where Telegram ran afoul of French authorities.

“If you do not cooperate with the French authorities when they officially ask you to disclose information about published content, you are simply hindering the French police or the French legal system,” Walter said. Assets“So that is a criminal offense per se.”

Telegram did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement posted on its Telegram channel on Sunday before Durov was charged, the company said it had “nothing to hide” and that it followed EU law. “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the misuse of that platform,” the company wrote.

For all the challenges other online platforms and social media companies have had with content moderation, they have rarely been as stubborn as Telegram. Durov’s arrest was “due to the peculiarity of the way Telegram operates,” said Ahmed Baladi, co-chair of the cybersecurity practice at law firm Gibson Dunn, who is based in the Paris office.

In addition to the lack of content moderation, Telegram often did not respond to requests from law enforcement and refused to honor subpoenas and court orders. These requests landed on a special email address that was rarely verified, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Other major platforms like X and Meta have never taken as low-key an approach as Telegram, according to Squire, who attributed this company-wide ethos to Durov’s “extreme tech-libertarianism.”

“This is different from what we see with some other technology platforms,” Squire said.

Telegram was a little quicker to respond to Apple and Google’s demands that it moderate its content or risk being removed from their mobile app stores. In 2018, Apple removed Telegram from its app store for a day because it allegedly failed to curb child pornography in the app. Telegram subsequently adjusted its content moderation policies.

But even that stands in stark contrast to other platforms that devote enormous resources to content moderation and employ teams of real people to sift through the worst content on the sites. In the US, social media companies have also shown some responsiveness to government requests, testifying before Congress in January.

These companies all behaved impeccably, meaning their CEOs were safe from criminal prosecution, according to Walter. “I don’t think Zuckerberg will be in custody next month,” he said.

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