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26-08-2024
PARIS: Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov has been arrested by French police at an airport north of Paris.
Durov was detained after his private jet had landed at Le Bourget Airport, French media reported.
According to officials the 39-year-old had been arrested under a warrant for offences related to the popular messaging app.
Russia’s embassy in France is taking “immediate steps” to clarify the situation, according to Russia’s TASS state news agency.
Durov had been travelling on his private jet, French TV channel TF1 said on its website.
Telegram is particularly popular in Russia, Ukraine and former Soviet Union states.
The app was banned in Russia in 2018, after a previous refusal by Durov to hand over user data.
Telegram is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.
Durov founded Telegram in 2013 and he left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.
Telegram says it has 500 million users worldwide. Most use the app to chat, but there’s more to it than that.
An investigation has found that women’s intimate pictures are being shared to harass, shame and blackmail them on a massive scale, on the social media app Telegram. In the split second Sara found out a nude photo of her had been leaked and shared on Telegram, her life changed. Her Instagram and Facebook profiles had been added, and her phone number included. Suddenly she was being contacted by unknown men asking for more pictures.
“They made me feel like I was a prostitute because (they believed) I’d shared intimate pictures of myself. It meant I had no value as a woman,” she says.
Sara, not her real name, had shared the photo with one person, but it had ended up in a Telegram group with 18,000 followers, many from her neighborhood in Havana, Cuba. She now fears strangers in the street may have seen her naked. “I didn’t want to go out, I didn’t want to have any contact with my friends. The truth is that I suffered a lot.”
She’s not alone. After months of investigating Telegram, we found large groups and channels sharing thousands of secretly filmed, stolen or leaked images of women in at least 20 countries. And there’s little evidence the platform is tackling this problem.
Thousands of miles from Cuba, Nigar is having to adjust to a new life.
She’s from Azerbaijan, but says she has been forced to leave her homeland. In 2021, a video of her having sex with her husband was sent to her family, and then posted in a Telegram group.
“My mum started crying and told me: ‘There’s a video, it was sent to me’,” she says. “I was devastated, absolutely devastated.” The video was shared in a group with 40,000 members. In the footage, Nigar’s now ex-husband’s face is blurred but hers is clearly visible. She believes her ex secretly filmed her to blackmail her brother, a prominent critic of Azerbaijan’s president. She says her mother was told the video would be released on Telegram unless her brother stopped his activism.
“They look at you as if you are a disgrace. Who cares if you were married?” says Nigar.
Nigar says she confronted her ex-husband about the video and he denied making it. We tried to get a comment from him, but he didn’t reply. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
