TELEGRAM CEO MAKES FIRST PUBLIC COMMENTS – Pavel Durov and his app were targeted by  French authorities 

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov is stepping-up efforts to fight criminality on the messaging app, his first public comments since French authorities handed him preliminary charges for allegedly allowing the platform’s use for criminal activity.

In a Telegram post, Durov defended himself against the French judicial investigation, suggesting that he personally shouldn’t have been targeted and French authorities should have approached his company with their complaints rather than detaining him.

In his post he said “Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach,”.

“Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.”