The founder of messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, who is under investigation in France, said the French should have approached his company with their complaints instead of arresting him, calling the arrest inappropriate, the Guardian reports.
Durov, writing on his Telegram channel early Friday in his first public post since his detention last month, denied any insinuations that the app was an "anarchist paradise."
The Russian-born multi-billionaire said the investigation into the app was surprising given that French authorities had access to a "hotline" he helped set up and could contact Telegram's EU representative at any time.
"If a country is unhappy with an internet service, it is common practice to take legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on a platform he manages is an inappropriate approach." , wrote Durov.
Telegram, he said, is not perfect, but he denied any abuses associated with the application. "However, claims in some media that Telegram is some kind of anarchist paradise are absolutely not true. We remove millions of harmful posts and channels every day," he added.
Durov, now a French citizen, was arrested late last month in France amid an investigation into crimes linked to child sexual abuse images, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions linked to the app.
He was charged by the French judiciary for allegedly facilitating criminal activity on the messaging app, but escaped custody on a five million bail. He was granted release on the condition that he report to the police station twice a week and remain in France.
The charges against Durov include complicity in the distribution of sexual images of children and a number of other alleged offenses on the messaging app.
His surprise arrest has put a spotlight on the criminal liability of Telegram, a popular app with about a billion users, and sparked debates about free speech and government censorship.
Bonus video:
