The owner of the Telegram messaging service Pavel Durov said that the French intelligence approached him earlier this year and asked him to block anti-government channels in the run up to this weekend's elections on two occasions in a post on Telegram on September 27.

“About a year ago, while I was stuck in Paris, the French intelligence services reached out to me through an intermediary, asking me to help the Moldovan government censor certain Telegram channels ahead of the presidential elections in Moldova,” Durov said.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk reposted the message with the brief comment: “Wow.”

The founder of Telegram encrypted messenger service now lives in self-imposed exile and was arrested in August last year as he got off his private jet in France.

Durov holds a dual French citizenship since 2021 was held for several days on child pornography and other cybersecurity charges by the French authorities. The officials said that Durov has failed to monitor his service which is widely used by criminals to conduct business including selling illicit pornography, although the charges were later dropped.

“After reviewing the channels flagged by French (and Moldovan) authorities, we identified a few that clearly violated our rules and removed them. The intermediary then informed me that, in exchange for this cooperation, French intelligence would “say good things” about me to the judge who had ordered my arrest in August last year,” Durov said in his post.

“This was unacceptable on several levels. If the agency did in fact approach the judge — it constituted an attempt to interfere in the judicial process. If it did not, and merely claimed to have done so, then it was exploiting my legal situation in France to influence political developments in Eastern Europe — a pattern we have also observed in Romania,” Durov added.

Telegram is one of the favourite messaging services and has played a key role in Belarus’ mass anti-government protests in 2020 and has been a thorn in the side of the Russian authorities, who tried to ban th service in 2008, but failed.

This weekend's elections are proving controversial and have led to accusations of an attempt to manipulate the outcome for the pro-Europe Sandu). The authorities banned two of the main opposition parties only 48 hours before the vote. Voting in the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria, which is under Russian occupation, has been cancelled. No polling stations have been provided for Moldovans living in Russia, according to reports, while extra stations for Moldovans living in the EU have been provided.

Durov said he was approached a second time by the French intelligence service with a more explicit politically motivated request to close down anti-government channels, which he refused to do.

“Shortly thereafter, the Telegram team received a second list of so-called “problematic” Moldovan channels. Unlike the first, nearly all of these channels were legitimate and fully compliant with our rules. Their only commonality was that they voiced political positions disliked by the French and Moldovan governments,” Durov wrote. “We refused to act on this request.”

Durov has taken a radical non-interference stance and says that it will not censor the content on its service and flatly refuses to cooperate with governments. However, after his arrest in France, investigations have found that he has on occasion cooperated with the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian security service.

“Telegram is committed to freedom of speech and will not remove content for political reasons. I will continue to expose every attempt to pressure Telegram into censoring our platform. Stay tuned,” Durov posted.