Telegram founder and chief executive Pavel Durov has criticized French authorities, calling his arrest last week over allegations of mishandling of messages on the messaging app “wrong”.

In his first public statement since his arrest, he dismissed claims that Telegram is “some kind of anarchist paradise” as “completely untrue.”

The Russian tycoon was arrested on August 25 at an airport north of Paris, and has since been charged with complicity in illegal transactions, drug trafficking, fraud and spreading images of child sexual abuse on his platform.

In his statement, which he posted on Telegram, Durov said that being held responsible for crimes committed by third parties on the platform was a “surprise” and a “wrong approach.”

“If a country is unhappy with an online service, the established practice is to initiate legal action against the service itself,” noted the Russian-born billionaire, who is also a French national.

“Using laws from a pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is the wrong approach.”

“Tech manufacturing is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be held personally liable for potential misuse of those tools,” he added.

While he admitted that Telegram isn’t perfect, he noted that French authorities had multiple ways to get in touch with him and Telegram, and that the app has an official representative in the EU.

“Claims in some media that Telegram is some kind of anarchist paradise are completely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day,” he insisted.

Telegram allows groups of up to 200,000 members, which critics have argued makes it easier for disinformation to spread and for users to share conspiracy, neo-Nazi, pedophile or terrorist content.

Recently in the UK, the app came under scrutiny for hosting far-right channels that were instrumental in organizing violent riots in English cities last month.

Telegram has removed some groups, but cyber experts say that overall its system for controlling extremist and illegal content is significantly weaker than that of other social media companies and messaging apps.

In his statement on Thursday, the Russian admitted that the “sharp increase” in the number of users on the messaging app – which he said was 950 million – has “caused increasing challenges that facilitate the abuse of our platform by criminals”.

He said he would seek to “significantly improve things in this regard”.

However, the BBC learned last week that Telegram had refused to take part in international programs aimed at identifying and removing child abuse material online.

Pavel Durov, 39, was born in Russia and currently lives in Dubai, where Telegram is also based. He has the citizenship of the United Arab Emirates and France.

Telegram, which he founded in 2013, is particularly popular in Russia, Ukraine and former Soviet Union states.

The platform was banned in Russia in 2018, after previously refusing to hand over user data. The ban came in 2021.

Telegram ranks as one of the biggest social media platforms/apps after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.

Speaking on Thursday about the arrest of Telegram’s founder in Paris, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he had met him years ago and had not seen him since. “France’s action on Durov was selective… I don’t understand it,” he commented.