By David Pierce , editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall

The problem with Telegram

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2024-08-30 16:00:05

By David Pierce , editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

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 internet as a whole.

After that, we run down some of the week in regulatory and litigation news, which is more exciting than it sounds! Yelp sued Google after years of complaints, TikTok is headed to court over the blackout challenge, and California’s AI safety bill is headed to the governor’s desk. As Nilay likes to say, there are a lot of really important PDFs floating around right now. We have some thoughts on the PDFs.