A day after being charged by Russian authorities with assisting terrorist activity and being placed on an international “wanted” list, the founder of the Telegram messaging app responded – with a meme.
Pavel Durov, a 41-year-old tech billionaire sometimes dubbed “Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg”, showed little sign of concern over the case launched by the Federal Security Service (FSB) last week.
Writing to his 11.3 million followers from his haven in Dubai, Durov said he was being branded a terrorist for refusing the Kremlin’s “demands for mass surveillance and censorship on Telegram” and posted a mocking image of Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov meeting the Afghan Taliban with the caption: “Don’t get confused.”
The FSB announced its charges against Durov on 29 July, claiming Telegram had been used by Ukrainian intelligence agencies to “lure Russian citizens into sabotage and terrorist activities through deception and psychological manipulation”.
There was an irony to the statement in light of the years-long use of Telegram by Russian agents to recruit people for sabotage and espionage operations across Europe, including a gang who set fire to a Ukrainian-owned warehouse in London and the man who launched arson attacks on property linked to Keir Starmer last year.
“I laughed a little bit when I saw that Russia was bringing this case against Durov,” said Steven Rai, a senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) who has been monitoring Russian activity on Telegram. “There’s countless examples of the Russian government using Telegram to export violence globally.”
The meme posted on Telegram by Durov in response to charges by the FSB (Photo: Telegram)Rai said Russia used Telegram to recruit “disposable” agents to act on its behalf, who are often financially vulnerable and may not know who they are working for because of the deployment of anonymous accounts and criminal proxies.
Iran and groups acting on its behalf have been using Telegram in the same way, with a Norwegian teenager who was sent to the UK to carry out an assassination last March among several recent cases.
Telegram is also a popular service among paedophile networks and criminal groups attracted by the service’s security features and range of functions.
But for authorities in Britain and Europe, the app has perhaps become most notorious for its use by terrorists and extremists of all kinds.
Joshua Fisher-Birch, a researcher at the Counter Extremism Project, described Telegram as “one of the most important platforms for sharing terrorist and extremist propaganda”, because of its rare combination of public broadcasting channels, chat groups, secure one-on-one messaging and file sharing capabilities.
Fisher-Birch said Isis was the first significant terrorist group to migrate to Telegram a decade ago, following takedowns on Twitter and other mainstream social networks.
Although Telegram has since taken down the group’s main channels, pro-Isis networks remain on the platform alongside violent neo-Nazis and a host of other groups, Fisher-Birch said. “There’s definitely a lighter touch versus many other platforms,” he added.
For Durov, terrorists’ use of Telegram “is a price which society pays for the opportunity to speak out without censorship”, according to his biographer, Nikolay Kononov, who wrote The Populist: The Untold Story of Pavel Durov and Telegram.
He said the tech magnate was “a bit religious about freedom of speech”.
“I am sure that there is a strong business reason for him as well,” Kononov added. “If Telegram loses its image as a safe place for everybody who doesn’t want to be under state surveillance, Durov will lose a significant part of its audience.”
The author said that Durov launched Telegram to the public in 2014, after selling his stake in his previous project – the Facebook-like Russian social network VK.com.
His vision was to create an online “ecosystem” where people could not only message, but watch videos, make purchases, read the news and live their entire online lives, Kononov said, while being “invisible to the state”.
Durov had previously drawn the Kremlin’s ire for refusing to shut down VK groups used by anti-government protesters, and Kononov said that Vladimir Putin himself made his feelings “aggressively” clear in a meeting with Durov in late 2013 – when an early version of Telegram was undergoing a public trial.
“Putin’s analysts put a policy paper on his table, in which they told him that both of Durov’s inventions were harmful and dangerous for the Kremlin,” Kononov said. “After the meeting, Durov decided to leave Russia.”
Despite its official hostility to Telegram, the Russian government has continued to use it as a primary means of public communication. Even after last week’s charges, the Kremlin itself maintains a public channel on the platform.
The key problem for Russia, Kononov said, is that Durov continues to refuse its demands for access to data on political dissidents, foreign intelligence agents and other targets.
“That was the only appeal from the Russian state to Durov – ‘please let us in’ – and he didn’t do it.”
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