by Christopher Roach
The recent arrest of Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durovwas in the news. Anti-Russian Westerners he cheered these events, even though Durov had fled Russia many years ago to pursue his techno-libertarian dreams in peace. In addition to the intrigue, the arrest may have had an element of treason, as some reports say he was invited to France by French President Emmanuel Macron, but was arrested on the airport tarmac. My God!
The alleged basis for Durov’s arrest is criminal liability for various unsavory things that happened on his Telegram platform. This type of vicarious liability for hosting websites, especially those that include user communications and forums, is not entirely modern, but it is controversial and always applied very selectively.
Nobody has caught Mark Zuckerberg, despite the fact that Facebook has had a lot of terrible things happen, like snuff films, child pornography, and more. On the other hand, after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, there was an outcry against less regulated Talk website that is a more casual discussion app similar to Twitter. Similarly, the message board 8chan, where the El Paso mass shooter posted a mini-manifesto in 2019, faced hosting and other boycotts by service providers which led to the institution’s closure shortly after public outcry.
Whether it is directed at individual speakers or entire forums, censorship is growing and is rooted in a changing set of values. There is less and less respect for the principles of free speech, especially among teenage people. New principles, such as the evil of “platforming” bad actors and the importance of psychological “safety,” prevail.
As these modern values have become increasingly crucial, the early libertarian ethos of the Internet has all but disappeared.
The deep state gets more for its money by putting pressure on monopolies
The internet is a winner-takes-all space. A few platforms control 90 percent of the content. Google, for example, owns search, while Facebook and its affiliates dominate social media. Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok also rule their own spheres.
Subpoenas, periodic harassment by congressional committees, regulatory crackdowns, and occasional arrests of company employees enable the government to impose mass censorship by exerting pressure on these key points of internet traffic.
Consider the recent threats by the European Union against Twitter CEO Elon Musk. EU Commissioner Thierry Breton recently warned Musk is expected to respect EU censorship rules during his interview with US presidential candidate Donald Trump. Musk, to his credit, refused and revealed EU censorship rules. aggressive actions aimed at controlling its content through the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction completely inconsistent with the First Amendment.
Trump-hating retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman presented the basic worldview of the managerial class in a discussion of recent events: “While Durov, a French citizen, was arrested for violating French law, this has broader implications for other social media outlets, including Twitter. There is a growing intolerance for platform-based disinformation and malign influence, and a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be nervous.”
The system doesn’t like people who speak out against it or oppose its orthodoxy. Just as they cheered Trump’s removal from Twitter, so too did parts of the American establishment, right and left, cheer the eventual arrest of WikiLeaks journalist Julian Assange in 2019. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even joked at the time about “droning” his.
AND he wrote earlier that “[o]One of the more destructive phenomena of recent years is what I would call the “Outcome-Oriented Epistemology of National Security.” In the case of a bloated national security regime, everything is information operation. There is no truth as such, there is only that which serves the mission or party line.”
This way of thinking, along with Durov and Musk’s guilt-by-association theories of responsibility, has no roots in our cherished American traditions of individual responsibility and free speech. The foundation of the First Amendment is a culture of free speech, and the foundation of that culture is a combination of distrust of those in power and humility toward our (or anyone else’s) ability to arrive at ultimate truth.
Only a belief in absolute possession of truth would allow competing ideas to be labeled as disinformation or disinformation. This is the unspoken premise behind the dominant ideology of technocratic management, which assumes that bureaucratic experts constitute a wise leadership class empowered to rule over foolish and easily misled subordinates.
Needless to say, this way of thinking is extremely anti-American, elitist, and totalitarian.
Durov was treated no better in the West than “authoritarian” Russia
In lightweight of recent events, one must ask whether the West is really as free as it imagines. A few decades ago, it was undeniably freer and more lively than the Soviet Union, China, and other authoritarian regimes. But recently?
We know that U.S. intelligence agencies successfully pressured social media platforms to influence the 2020 election. We know that of a kind charges were invented to persecute Trump, largely because he is a dissident political figure. We know that extreme policies have been implemented at every level of government during COVID-19, with very little domestic resistance, including censorship demands discussions that fall within the mainstream of ordinary scientific debate.
The biggest change, however, is the boost in self-censorship: almost no one says what they think anymore.
Durov left Russia for the same reason he was arrested in France. He began his success by inventing VKontakte (VK), a social networking site similar to Facebook. Like Facebook, it became an extremely popular place for discussion, social organization, and occasional political activity.
At the beginning of the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine, the FSB – Russia’s equivalent of the FBI – wanted to gain access to user communications and other user data, and Durov was not willing to provide this. The Russian authorities very quickly took control of VK, and Durov soon had to sell his shares and flee the country.
He invented Telegram from the ground up to be immune to this kind of thing, mainly through encryption and data storage protocols. Essentially, with the “secret chat” feature, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. As it stands, site administrators can’t provide data requested by authorities.
The Telegram platform is very crucial in repressive societies and is increasingly popular with Western dissidents. It carries a lot of news about the war in Ukraine and Gaza, unlike the carefully selected information that appears in mainstream Western news.
French arrest papers accuse Durov of everything under the sun, trying to lock him up on the theory that he facilitates criminal abuse of the platform. It’s a similar theory of liability for two life sentences awarded to Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht in a US federal court in 2013.
This precedent was unique in that nothing legitimate seemed to be happening on its Tor-based marketplace. In contrast, the extensive majority of Telegram usage seems completely normal and legal, if occasionally controversial, like the entire internet before 2016.
Sovereignty matters even for “citizens of the world” who travel by plane
Durov is a billionaire, has citizenship in many countries, and he and his team often change places of residence from Berlin to Dubai and parts in between. But no matter how one imagines, he is always under the jurisdiction of some country.
The broader question surrounding Durov’s arrest is whether every internet platform has to partner with the Deep State of at least one country. Former Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev he said“I asked Durov a long time ago why he didn’t want to cooperate with law enforcement on serious crimes. ‘That’s my principled position,’ he said. ‘Then there will be serious problems in every country,’ I told him.” It seems so.
Avoiding these types of “problems” through cooperation seems to already be happening. We know that Elon Musk, for example, is working hand in hand with the US military-industrial intricate in providing Starlink to Ukraine and rockets for NASA. More directly, Facebook assisted the FBI in interfering in the 2020 election.hiding Hunter Biden’s laptop story.
Durov deserves respect for his consistent and principled stance on protecting user privacy, which did not allow cooperation with the Russian Deep State. At the time, Westerners saw this pressure as proof of Russian backwardness and oppression. Russia is undoubtedly more authoritarian and lacks the liberal tradition of the West. But if Russia has a particularly authoritarian approach to free speech, it is strenuous to reconcile that with the clear pressure exerted on Facebook and Twitter to influence the American election, persecution of Julian Assange for simply publishing the documents provided to him, or Durov’s recent arrest for sharing content that regularly appears on other platforms.
France wants to treat Durov like Silk Road, but his platforms — VK and Telegram — are, like Facebook and Twitter, largely unregulated transmitters of user-generated content. No one thinks Google Or Facebook should be responsible for users’ communications with other people.
France, alone or as United States Agentnow takes off the mask. It turns out that the times of the West, consisting of exceptionally “open” societies, are over, and modern morality, that requires that speech be policed by well-meaning Deep State apparatchiks is as alive among the United States and its allies as it is among our competitors in Russia and China.
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Christopher Roach is an associate fellow at the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice in Florida. He is a dual graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously published in The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views expressed are his own.
Photo by “Telegram CEO Pavel Durov” Pavel Durov.
