Pavel Durov

It would be political censorship.

We protected freedom of speech in many countries in the world, including in Asia, in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East.

We're not going to start engaging in censorship in Europe, no matter who is asking us.

I was very clear to the guy who was the head of French intelligence.

I said, if you think that because I'm stuck here, you can tell me what to do, you're very wrong.

I would rather do the opposite every time.

And in a way, that's what I did.

had a small debate with him about the morality of this whole thing and then at a certain point just disclose the content of this entire conversation because I never signed an NDA I don't ever sign NDAs with any people like that I want to be able to tell the world what's going on and that's quite shocking to me that you would have people in the French government

trying to get advantage of this situation.

Of course, if they had nothing to do with the start of this investigation itself.

millions of Telegram users collectively.

And it's quite strange that the same agency asked us to do certain things in Moldova as well.

So even before that, I think it was October last year or September, I was arrested in Paris in late August.

And then again approached through an intermediary and asked, would you mind taking down some channels in Moldova because there is an election going on and we're afraid there's going to be some interference with these elections.

could you please connect with the representatives of the government of Moldova and take care of it?

We said, we're happy to take a look at it and see if there is content there that is in violation of our rules.

And they sent us a list of channels and bots.

Some of them were, so it was a very short list, and some of these channels and bots were

in violation indeed of our rules, and we took them down, only a few of them.

The rest were okay.