Telegram founder Pavel Durov has been arrested at Bourget airport outside Paris allegedly over the social media app's unfettered dissemination of information, according to reports.
The Russian-French billionaire and CEO of Telegram was travelling aboard his private jet on Saturday when he was arrested by the French authorities.
According to Reuters, Durov's arrest came as part of an investigation into lack of moderation on the app, which has over 1 billion users worldwide, close to a 100 million in India.
Reports say Durov faces possible indictment on Sunday.
The app is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and other eastern European countries and is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and China's TikTok and Wechat.
Durov, who founded Telegram with his brother in 2013, left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.
"I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone," Durov told US journalist Tucker Carlson in April.
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Telegram has become the main source of unfiltered, at times even propagandistic, content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict.
According to Reuters, the Russian foreign ministry said its embassy in Paris was working with authorities for release of Durov and has even called on Western NGOs to press for his freedom.
Russia, on its part, began blocking Telegram in 2018 after the app refused to comply with a court order to grant state security services access to its users' encrypted messages.
French website TF1 said Dubai-based Durov had been travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8 pm local time (1800 GMT).
Mikhail Ulyanov, the representative of Russia Mission in Vienna, in a post on X called Durov "naive" and some democracies "totalitarian."
"Some naive persons still don't understand that if they play more or less visible role in international information space it is not safe for them to visit countries which move towards much more totalitarian societies," Ulyanov wrote.
X owner Elon Musk threw his lot behind the fellow entrepreneur posting several messages on his app castigating France for his arrest. "It's 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme," he wrote.
In another post, Musk drew parallels between Durov and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.
"Because he already caved into censorship pressure. Instagram has a massive child exploitation problem, but no arrest for Zuck, as he censors free speech and gives governments backd," he wrote.
Computer scientist and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham said: "It's hard to imagine a country both arresting the founder of Telegram and being a major startup hub."
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