Telegram is no "anarchic paradise" where everything and anything goes, the social network's founder Pavel Durov said. At the same time, Durov conceded that more needs to be done to stop illicit activities, and has set in motion a range of measures to clean up Telegram.
Durov was arrested by French authorities last month after landing at Le Bourget airport in Paris on his private jet. He is being investigated by French prosecutors over a range of criminal activities allegedly taking place on Telegram and is currently out on €5 million bail, banned from leaving the country and having to report to the police twice a week.
In a post on Telegram, Durov said the social network removes "millions of harmful posts and channels every day" and publishes transparency reports, also daily.
Furthermore, Durov said Telegram has direct hotlines to non-government organisations to process urgent moderation requests faster.
Durov recognised calls for improving the moderation though, and said Telegram's massive growth - he cited the number of users as 950 million currently - has caused "growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform".
Now, Durov said he has made it his personal goal to improve the moderation process on Telegram, with one measure being making it easier for authorities to find where to send requests.
Some of the measures include:
- Removal of the "People Nearby" feature. Durov said fewer than 0.1% of Telegrammers used the feature, which had issues with bots and scammers.
- "People Nearby" will be replaced by "Businesses Nearby", to showcase legitimate, verified organisations.
- Media uploads to the Telegraph blogging tool have been disabled, as they were being abused by anonymous actors, Durov said.
"... this year we are committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism to one of praise," Durov said of the changes coming up for the social network.
The move comes after Durov was told by French police that he'll be held personally responsible for other people's illegal use of Telegram, as the authorities didn't receive responses from the social network.
He expressed surprise at that, and added that Telegram has an EU representative that accepts and replies to requests from authorities in the European bloc.
Durov further went on to say it was a "misguided approach" to charge a chief executive with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he [the chief executive] manages, and establishing the balance between privacy and security isn't easy.
Telegram was banned in Russia for refusing to hand over encryption keys to enable surveillance, and in Iran for not blocking channels of peaceful protesters, Durov said.
The social network was unblocked in Russia four years ago, and is said to be used by the country's armed forces for communications.
It also appears the blocking of Telegram in Russia was ineffective and caused collateral damage with other services and sites being accidentally restricted, due to the country's regulator lacking fine-grained filtering capabilities.
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