Telegram will start moderating private chats after CEO’s arrest

Now, Durov appears to have changed his tone.

“Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform,” he wrote in the statement shared today. “That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.”

Some of those changes appear to be already taking effect: the company’s FAQ page has changed in the last 24 hours. Take one section titled, “There’s illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?”

As of September 5th, Telegram’s response to the question read in part, “All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them,” according to a Wayback Machine archive of the page.

But at the time of this writing, that sentence has been removed. Instead, has been replaced with: “All Telegram apps have ‘Report’ buttons that let you flag illegal content for our moderators — in just a few taps,” followed by instructions on how to report content.