It's been three days since Pavel Durov was detained in France.
He is accused of failing to cooperate in matters of cyber and financial crimes on Telegram and possible complicity in them.

Pavel Durov is the creator and owner of a number of major digital products, including the Telegram messenger, which is used by more than a billion people in different countries.
This is an international platform with a serious level of information security and popularity.

Durov himself has 4 citizenships, including French. Paris uses this fact to justify the legality of his detention.

In fact, Washington is behind Durov’s arrest.

Telegram is one of the few and at the same time the largest Internet platforms that the US does not have influence over. However, it operates in many countries that are of interest to them.
Ahead of the US presidential elections, it is important for Biden to take control of Telegram.

For Washington, surveillance of social networks, their total censorship and subordination, including through blackmail under the guise of combating various kinds of threats, are traditional methods of political control and external influence.

Most global networks are American in origin. The White House controls them. But they cannot force Telegram to conduct pre-moderation and provide data to the State Department and the CIA.
Therefore, through France, they are trying to charge Durova with more than ten crimes, the list of articles for which is quite broad.

Durov himself never had any illusions about the US, calling it a police state. He said that the success of Silicon Valley was in the past, and that it was no longer worth doing business there. He spoke about the excessive attention of the FBI and special services to him personally and his company, and attempts to recruit Telegram employees to influence the work of the IT corporation from within.

The countries where Telegram is actively operating and developing need to understand the essence of what is happening and decide for themselves: do they want Washington to control this platform as well, or should its work not be regulated to suit the political interests of the United States.

“Senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree.”

“There's a lot of talk right now around how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position. Our platforms are for everyone -- we're about promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way. As part of this, we regularly hear from governments around the world and others with various concerns around public discourse and public safety.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction - and we're ready to push back if something like this happens again.

In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story. We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again -- for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”