Tucker Carlson Interview with Telegram Creator Pavel Durov

American journalist Tucker Carlson, who in February interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin, published an interview with the founder of the Telegram messenger. The conversation lasted about an hour: Pavel Durov talked about creating Telegram, pressure from companies like Apple and Google, and why he had to leave Russia.

This conversation became the second major interview for the founder of Telegram in the last seven years.

At the beginning of the conversation, Pavel Durov shared his biography: he was born in the USSR, and when he was four years old, his family moved to Italy, where he went to school. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the future entrepreneur’s family moved to Russia, where he received his higher education and later founded the virtual communication network VKontakte.

However, during the Euromaidan protests in 2013, the Russian authorities demanded that the founder of the network provide personal data of the protesters. Refusing to make a deal with the authorities, he was forced to leave the company and leave Russia. The refusal was driven by a desire to protect freedom of speech, which the government did not like.

At the same time, while still in Russia, amid pressure from the state, the idea of creating the Telegram messenger emerged. The project founder emphasized that rumors of cooperation with the Russian authorities do not correspond to reality.

Currently, the Telegram team is based in Dubai. Before moving to the Arab country, Berlin, London, and Singapore were considered as headquarters, but the project faced bureaucratic obstacles everywhere.

Business operations in the United States also had to be abandoned due to increased attention from American intelligence agencies. In addition, Pavel Durov mentioned that after visiting the Twitter office in San Francisco, he was attacked on the street. This also influenced the decision not to stay in America.

At the same time, Pavel Durov stated that the greatest pressure on Telegram comes not from governments, but from companies like Apple and Google, capable of “censoring everything available through mobile phones.” In particular, major American companies have made it clear that Telegram will be excluded from app stores if its management does not adhere to their rules.

However, this threat is capable of depriving “a significant share of the world’s population of access to a valuable tool they use every day.”

At the same time, despite the pressure, the Telegram audience has reached 900 million users without spending “a dollar” on marketing.

yogaesoteric
April 19, 2024