A month after French authorities charged him with allowing drug trafficking and child abuse on his territory, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced Monday that the popular messaging app has taken several steps to crack down on illegal content.
In a significant change, the company changed its policies, and will now hand over Telegram users’ IP addresses and phone numbers to law enforcement agencies in response to legitimate legal requests. Before Durov’s arrest, the company’s FAQ page said: “All Telegram chats and group chats are private between their participants. We do not process any requests related to them.”
In a post on Telegram, first reported by Bloomberg, Durov said a team of moderators has spent the past few weeks removing unsafe and illegal content. Telegram has also revamped the platform’s search function to make it less likely to find such things.
“These measures should discourage criminals,” Durov wrote. “Telegram Search is intended to find friends and news, not to promote illegal goods. We will not allow bad actors to compromise the integrity of our platform for nearly a billion users.”
Durov, a French citizen, was arrested on August 28 after arriving on his private plane at an airport outside Paris after a trip to Azerbaijan.
French prosecutors charged him with distributing child sexual abuse materials, organized fraud, and conspiring with criminals to commit crimes. Prosecutors’ press release also alleged that Telegram failed to share information with police about illegal activity on the platform. The governments of Iran and Russia have previously blocked the app by refusing to hand over data to authorities, although Russia later lifted the ban.
Days after Durov’s arrest, Telegram said its founder had nothing to hide and that it was “unreasonable” to hold the company or its owner accountable for users who violated the platform’s policies.
In a previous public statement, Durov said, “The French authorities had many ways to reach me to ask for help,” including a dedicated email address for European law enforcement requests. But he admitted that the rapid growth of the platform—which has about 950 million users—had caused “growing pains.”
In the weeks since Durov’s arrest, Telegram has made several changes to the platform in addition to a new policy governing legal requests. It removed the People Nearby feature, which shows a list of other users nearby, and disabled media uploads on Telegraph, the company’s blogging platform, “which appear to have been used by unknown players,” Durov said.