Although he spent part of his childhood in Italy, Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram arrested on Saturday, August 24 by the French police as part of an investigation into the lack of moderation of his platform, embodies the success of tech entrepreneurs in Saint Petersburg, where he was born in 1984. It was there, in a city that is home to a large community of startupers and researchers, that he founded VKontakte with his brother in 2006, a social network largely inspired by Facebook, which would become a huge success in Russia and in the Russian-speaking world.
Beyond economic success, in the early 2010s in Russia, Pavel Durov was above all the Robin Hood of the Web who, in a country with an authoritarian regime, dared to place the defense of individual freedoms above all else. Thus in 2013, still in the company of his brother Nikolai, he launched the Telegram messaging service: he intended to defend the right of individuals to privacy and, thwarting the authorities' appetite for control, guarantee the freedom to exchange messages without being read. More libertarian than rebellious, Telegram nevertheless refused in 2018 to transmit to the Russian secret services the codes allowing them to read users' messages. The State then spent tens of millions of rubles on technical measures to try to block the application, causing the Russian Internet to rock for several weeks: hundreds of sites in fact stopped working, due to IP address blocking. But the messaging service held firm.
In France, Telegram had already found itself in the dock after the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris. The terrorists are said to have communicated on the messaging service, before the attacks and with complete impunity. After these French criticisms, like those in Russia, also the target of attacks, and while Mr. Durov is accused of having known for a long time that the Daesh jihadists were using his messaging service, he defends himself in a joking manner, proposing “to ban words”. And in Russian web circles, many share his irony: “If there is a knife murder, is the knife the culprit?”
The “Russian Mark Zuckerberg”
Long nicknamed the “Mark Zuckerberg of the Russian Web”he is the most terrible of the children of the bubble of freedom that had managed to take flight far from the Kremlin and its restrictive laws. In Moscow, he maintains an image of a rebel outside the system, refusing to associate his image with that of the Russian, cultivating a global vision and projects. To the point that in 2014, a standoff pitted him against the authorities over the fate of VKontakte, deemed too unruly. With its some 100 million users in Russia and the former Soviet republics, the social network plays, in the eyes of the Kremlin, a crucial role in the pro-European revolution in kyiv. The FSB (one of the heirs of the KGB) then demanded that Durov be able to recover the data of the leaders who had used it to mobilize the crowds. “No”answers Pavel Durov.
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Source: Lemonde
