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The battle over free speech is entering a dark phase, with Europe – the continent that birthed communism, fascism and Nazism – leading the charge. Across the channel, Britain is little better, with the Der Sturmer regime arresting and jailing citizens for social media posts, while murderous thugs walk free after just six months.
The British police and political establishment are already vaguely threatening X owner Elon Musk – almost certainly impotently, as no American court would extradite a US citizen over matters that easily fall under First Amendment protections.
European authoritarians are free of any such restriction – and they’re flexing their legal muscles.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that the arrest in France of the CEO of the popular messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, wasn’t a political move but part of an independent investigation.
Without a blush of shame, Macron used X to proclaim that France “is deeply committed” to freedom of expression. ‘But…’
Durov was detained Saturday at Le Bourget airport in a judicial inquiry opened last month involving 12 alleged criminal violations, the Paris prosecutor’s office said Monday.
It said in a statement that the suspected violations include complicity in selling child sexual abuse material and in drug trafficking, fraud, abetting organized crime transactions and refusing to share information or documents with investigators when required by law.
The allegations seem to be less that Durov is personally involved in such matters, but that Telegram’s commitment to free speech and privacy are facilitating those who are. It’s no secret, for instance, that terror plotters have used Telegram to surreptitiously communicate.
The question becomes how responsible the platform provider is for abuses committed using the platform.
As it happens, Telegram’s pro-privacy philosophy originated in response to another authoritarian regime.
Telegram, which says it has nearly a billion users worldwide, was founded by Durov and his brother after he himself faced pressure from the Russian authorities […]
Durov said the authorities demanded that the site take down online communities of Russian opposition activists, and later that it hand over personal data of users who took part in the 2013 popular uprising in Ukraine, which eventually ousted a pro-Kremlin president.
Durov said in a recent interview that he had turned down these demands and left the country […]
Telegram also continues to be a popular source of news in Ukraine, where both media outlets and officials use it to share information on the war, and deliver missile and air raid alerts.
The question then becomes whether such ‘good’ outweighs the obviously evil uses to which some unscrupulous creeps put the platform.
Western governments have often criticized Telegram for a lack of content moderation, which experts say opens up the messaging platform for potential use in money laundering, drug trafficking and the sharing of material linked to the sexual exploitation of minors.
In 2022, Germany issued fines of $5 million against Telegram’s operators for failing to establish a lawful way to reporting illegal content or to name an entity in Germany to receive official communication. Both are required under German laws that regulate large online platforms.
Last year, Brazil temporarily suspended Telegram over its failure to surrender data on neo-Nazi activity related to a police inquiry into school shootings in November.
Where Durov made his name, and powerful enemies, by thumbing his nose at censorious authoritarians (even if that meant enabling predators along the way), other tech titans are making no secret of bowing to the diktats of other censorious authoritarians.
The US government pressured social media company Meta during the coronapandemic to censor reports of the virus on its platforms. CEO Mark Zuckerberg of the company said that. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, among others.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden government, including from the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain covid-19 content, including humor and satire,” Zuckerberg writes in a letter to a committee of the House of Representatives.
And Zuckerberg bent the knee: “it was ultimately our decision to remove certain content”. Content such as plausible theories regarding the origins of the pandemic or the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop. In the latter case, it’s no stretch to call it election interference: post-election polls indicate that, had the truth about the ‘laptop from hell’ been available to American voters, enough would have switched their vote to likely swing the election.
In what may be a sign that Silicon Valley recognises that the 2024 election may not go the Democrats’ way, Zuckerberg is suddenly throwing out the olive branches. He “regrets decisions about message deletion. He also regrets that he has not previously spoken about the pressure from the White House.”
Zuckerberg is not the only tech boss who is critical of past interventions on social media. Twitter's former CEO Jack Dorsey also said earlier that blocking certain messages on the messaging service went too far.
Far be it for me to suggest that the tech titans are merely desperate to mollify a vengeful President Trump.
