by Rick Findlay, Reclaim The Net:
In a defiant interview, Durov warns that Europe’s push for surveillance risks normalizing the very authoritarianism it claims to fight.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov made no attempt to hide his frustration with French authorities during a wide-ranging conversation on The Lex Fridman Podcast, describing the French government’s investigation into him and his company as “Kafkaesque,” “absurd,” and deeply damaging.
He warned that efforts to undermine digital privacy are accelerating not just in France, but across Europe and beyond, using pretexts like child protection and election integrity to justify surveillance and censorship.
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Throughout the interview, Durov painted a grim picture of what he sees as growing authoritarianism disguised as public safety.
“Every dictator in the world justifies taking away your rights with very reasonable-sounding justifications,” he said, warning that citizens often don’t realize the gravity of their loss until it’s too late. “Every message they send is monitored. They can’t assemble. It’s over.”
Durov flatly rejected the idea that any government, including France’s, could force Telegram to grant access to users’ private conversations.
“Nothing,” he responded when asked if there was any scenario in which French intelligence could gain a backdoor.
He emphasized that Telegram does not and will not use personal data to power ad targeting, saying, “We would never use…your personal messaging data or your context data or your metadata or your activity data to target ads.”
Despite facing legal pressure and travel restrictions stemming from the French case, Durov said Telegram remains firm in its refusal to censor political content or violate users’ privacy.
“The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defiant I become,” he said, accusing French authorities of trying to “humiliate” him and millions of Telegram users through coercive tactics.
Durov described encounters with French intelligence officials who allegedly tried to pressure him into shutting down Telegram channels during elections in Romania and Moldova, actions he said would have amounted to “political censorship.”
He recounted being approached while detained in France and asked to disable channels that criticized preferred candidates of Western-aligned governments. “If you think that, because I’m stuck here, you can tell me what to do, you are very wrong,” Durov said he told one official.
He made it clear that Telegram had only taken down content in Moldova that actually violated platform rules, refusing broader demands that lacked justification.
Following that, Durov claims the intelligence agencies used his cooperation to influence his ongoing legal case in France, feeding information to the investigating judge, an action he found “shocking” and deeply suspect.
Although the French government’s case against Telegram remains unresolved, Durov noted that he and his legal team have yet to be given a hearing date for their appeal.
