When French authorities arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov after his attempted meeting with Vladimir Putin, conspiracy theories spread like wildfire.
Andrew Tate was early to spin the news in his favor, writing on X (formerly Twitter), “The owner of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has just been arrested in France for failing to censor the truth on his application.
“Potential charges include support for terrorism, drug trafficking, complicity in crimes, mass fraud, money laundering, concealment, pedophile content, sanctions evasion, and more.”
Others soon re-posted his non-falsifiable dog whistle, earning it millions of impressions and hundreds of thousands of likes.
Mischaracterizations of Durov’s arrest proliferated.
Fans of Durov, casting the billionaire as a bulwark of privacy and free speech, immediately posited that authorities were leveraging his arrest to coerce him to install backdoors in Telegram for governmental monitors.
Of course, this theory assumes that Durov had consistently protected the privacy of Telegram user data prior to his arrest, which is a subject of considerable debate.
The Azerbaijan visit and Vladimir Putin
Another conspiracy theory regarding Durov’s arrest concerns the timing of his flights to Azerbaijan and France. Proponents point to the fact that Vladimir Putin was in Azerbaijan at the same time as Durov. Kremlin-controlled media claims that Durov tried to arrange a meeting with Putin which Putin reportedly declined.
Assuming the worst here, theorists claim that Durov voluntarily chose to fly to France to escape Russian retaliation, knowing that his inevitable arrest would provide physical security and buy him time to plan his next move. (Durov is a French citizen with a European Union passport and would prefer European due process to a Russian jail, these theorists claim.)
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An offshoot of this theory proposes that European authorities arrested Durov to exert negotiation pressure on Putin. The idea here is that Western governments are presently using their detention of Durov — who has historically cooperated with Putin, such as on his compliant operation of VK, Durov’s Russian version of Facebook — as leverage for geopolitical negotiation with Putin.
For his part, French President Emmanuel Macron claimed that Durov’s arrest wasn’t political. Instead, he assures the public that the arrest narrowly relates to an independent investigation involving 12 alleged criminal violations.
