Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France last weekend, and a few days later was charged with a number of offenses connected to criminal activity on Telegram. There’s a lot about this story we don’t yet know, but this week’s events seem to signal a shift in how countries and governments plan to hold executives accountable for what happens on their platforms.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and make sense of what happened here — and what might happen next. We talk about what makes Telegram different from WhatsApp or Facebook, the ways Durov set up and operated the company that may have made this confrontation inevitable, and whether this will have a ripple effect on the rest of the social internet. Or even the rest of the…