Telegram CEO arrested in France

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of social media app Telegram, has been arrested in France for not removing user content from the platform when ordered to by the authorities.  

The outrageous arrest of Telegram’s Pavel Durov | Spiked | Fraser Myers: 

26th August 26, 2024 - "In 2013, the Russian authorities searched the home and offices of social-media magnate Pavel Durov.... [T]he raid was widely believed to be in retaliation for his platform’s persistent refusal to censor critics of the government. VK, Durov’s Russian-language competitor to Facebook, had consistently rejected the Kremlin’s demands to block the accounts of Putin’s domestic opponents and to hand over data belonging to protesters in Ukraine. In 2014, he sold his stake in VK, resigned as CEO, and fled his home country. Durov, a self-described libertarian, says he was not prepared to do the state’s bidding. Since he left, VK is now more or less controlled by the Kremlin.

"More than a decade later and Durov is in trouble with the law again. His newer app, Telegram, is in the firing line this time. He was arrested and detained on Saturday and charged with 12 crimes, seemingly all in connection with Telegram’s failure to comply with the authorities’ requests to remove certain content. But Durov was not arrested in Russia this time. He was apprehended as his private jet touched down in France.

Pavel Durov in 2013. TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons.

"The 12 charges include ‘complicity’ in alleged crimes as diverse as child exploitation, fraud, drug trafficking, money laundering and terrorism. As despicable as such crimes may be, it is unprecedented for the authorities in a Western liberal democracy to hold a social-media platform and its founder criminally liable for content shared by others.... The commonsense principle that social-media firms are not directly responsible for their users’ content had held firm until relatively recently in Europe. 

"Yet, in the past few years, Europe’s illiberal elites have been gripped by hysteria about the supposedly malign influence of major tech platforms.... [A]lmost every societal problem is now pinned on an excess of online freedom. This has prompted a series of laws, from the EU’s Digital Services Act to the UK’s Online Safety Act, which effectively treat platforms as publishers of user-generated content, threatening them with fines if they fail to remove posts that contravene their rules.

"Telegram has over 900 million users worldwide and is well known for its laissez-faire approach to content and its fierce protection of its users’ privacy. It hosts both private conversations and ‘channels’, which allow a single user to disseminate messages directly to large numbers of followers. But its terms of service do prohibit terrorist content, scams, illegal pornography and incitement to violence. Notably it has removed ISIS-linked channels and white-supremacist groups involved with the ‘January 6’ storming of the US Capitol.

"Durov, the sole owner, insists his platform is neutral and ‘not a player in geopolitics’. Nevertheless, Telegram is especially notorious for hosting pro-war Russian bloggers.... This has led to suspicions that the Kremlin has more control or influence over Telegram than Durov lets on. The Russian government’s call for his release over the weekend has only compounded these fears.... Yet, on the other hand, there is no evidence that Telegram has censored, say, critics of Putin. Notably, it is also highly popular in Ukraine. It remains one of the few platforms to allow Russians to access information about the war that isn’t filtered by the Kremlin. Telegram also proved essential for those organising pro-democracy protests against the CCP in Hong Kong in 2019. To characterise the app purely as a propaganda tool for authoritarians like the Russian government, as many observers in the West are keen to do, is to miss the bigger picture. Durov’s own past run-ins with the Kremlin also suggest he is sincere in his libertarian beliefs.

"Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, was quick to defend Durov in the wake of his arrest. Musk, himself persona non grata among the Western liberal establishment, thanks to X’s more liberal speech policies, claims there is a political vendetta against Telegram and Durov. Musk argues that Instagram, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, ‘has a massive child-exploitation problem, but no arrest for Zuck, as he censors free speech and gives governments backdoor access to user data… He already caved into censorship pressure.’ In other words, while all platforms have unwittingly hosted illegal content, just as Telegram is alleged to have done, the European authorities are primarily interested in targeting those platforms that refuse to accede to their demands to censor political dissent.

"Certainly, some of those defending Durov’s arrest are not making any effort to dispel this impression. A piece in the Guardian has hailed it as a ‘smart move’ that could panic tech executives like Musk into censoring more content at governments’ behest. That ‘nagging fear [of arrest] is no bad thing’, it said. (Earlier this month, a former Twitter exec wrote another piece in the Guardian calling explicitly for Musk’s arrest.) It is hard not to suspect that allowing unfettered political speech is Telegram’s real crime in the eyes of the elites....

"The criminalisation of Pavel Durov sets a deeply troubling precedent. If social-media execs are to be held liable for posts on their platforms, then a ramping up of pre-emptive censorship seems inevitable. Europeans must stand up to this now, lest they lose their online freedoms for good."

Read more: https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/26/the-outrageous-arrest-of-telegrams-pavel-durov/