All the news on Telegram CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France last weekend, and a few days later was charged with a number of offenses connected to criminal activity on Telegram. There’s a lot about this story we don’t yet know, but this week’s events seem to signal a shift in how countries and governments plan to hold executives accountable for what happens on their platforms.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and make sense of what happened here — and what might happen next. We talk about what makes Telegram different from WhatsApp or Facebook, the ways Durov set up and operated the company that may have made this confrontation inevitable, and whether this will have a ripple effect on the rest of the social internet. Or even the rest of the internet as a whole.

A French investigative judge has charged Telegram CEO Pavel Durov with enabling illegal transactions among other alleged offenses, according to reports from NBC News and Le Monde. Durov had been arrested Saturday as part of an investigation into child sexual abuse material and other criminal activity on Telegram.

The charges were later detailed in a press release posted to the official LinkedIn account of the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Telegram says its CEO and founder Pavel Durov has “nothing to hide” after he was arrested by French authorities outside of Paris.

“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” the company says in an unnamed statement posted to its official channel in the Telegram app on Sunday. French officials have confirmed to multiple outlets that Durov was arrested as part of a police investigation into criminal activity taking place on the social network.