On August 24, 39-year-old Pavel Durov, CEO of social medium Telegram, was arrested at an airport outside Paris on twelve charges related to failure to remove certain content. The French government appears to have wanted a back door into Telegram, which has 900 million active users. The arrest likely kited Durov’s planned public offering of shares.

Durov’s first run-in with a government was in Russia

As Fraser Myers reports at Spiked Online,

In 2013, the Russian authorities searched the home and offices of social-media magnate Pavel Durov. He was alleged to have caused a traffic accident, although the 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.

Holding Durov criminally liable for content shared by others on his platform sent a shock wave through the upper ranks of social media bosses. If our model is a telephone system, that would be like holding the phone company CEO responsible for a sexist rant by one of the parties to a conference call. And public broadcasting doesn’t work well as a model either because people choose to belong to a Telegram or Facebook group or to leave it. It is not “broadcast” to us. So the area is inherently complex.

In the United States, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act exempts the social medium owner from liability for the online statements of the many millions of users — otherwise, the whole system would be untenable. But some authorities feel that there is not enough policing. Both the EU and Britain have now passed laws making the platform owner equivalent to a publisher, thus preventing an exemption from liability. There is reason to believe that the United States was at least aware of such a bold move on France’s part and did not dissent from it.

Hosting many voices

Myers notes that the framing of Telegram merely as a routine host for controversial content is not accurate: “ … 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.” It hosts both pro-war Russian bloggers and Putin’s critics, he says. And yet it is also popular in Ukraine. It’s been an essential tool for pro-democracy organizers in Hong Kong.

Government demands for censorship and user data are growing rapidly

As tech writer Casey Newton says at Platformer, “A worrisome outcome of France’s ultimate prosecution of Telegram, assuming there is one, is that it will embolden countries around the world to prosecute platform CEOs criminally for failing to turn over user data.”

For example, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is calling for global censorship efforts. US vice presidential candidate Keith Ellison recently praised Brazil for banning X. Germany threatened to ban Telegram in 2022.

And, as might be expected, legacy media are quick to impute guilt to those who have cost them their monopoly on news. From the New York Times “Drug dealers, scammers and white nationalists openly conduct business and spread toxic speech on the platform, according to a Times analysis of more than 3.2 million Telegram messages.” The implicit message is that it isn’t happening elsewhere.

What does the crackdown on “toxic speech” really amount to?

Telegram has hosted some awful stuff, including, for example, a group that enjoyed videos of monkeys being tortured to death. But was Telegram alone? As a moderator of a Facebook group dedicated to the intelligent design controversy, I have had to ban a number of parasitic users who prey on a variety of sites to post pornography while the mods aren’t looking.

Facebook does try to do something about them. But any claims that it is squeaky clean are surely suspect. It may be hassled less often because it is simply more willing to do the bidding of governments that want political foes censored, a fact that Zuckerberg recently admitted and says he regrets.

That, at any rate, is what X’s owner Elon Musk thinks: Responding to Durov’s arrest, he noted, “Instagram has a massive child exploitation problem, but no arrest for Zuck [Mark Zuckerberg], as he censors free speech and gives governments backdoor access to user data.

“Dangerous precedents”

At Fortune, tech analyst David Meyer says Telegram had more problems with illegal content than most but, he concedes, “If the French authorities are going after Durov because they want to undermine the strong encryption on Telegram’s secret messages, that would indeed be a bad thing that sets dangerous precedents.”

Commentator Mark Steyn, no stranger to international free speech battles, takes that part for granted:

As you know, I am not a “platform” kind of guy – because, to cut to the chase, there are two kinds of platform: a) platforms that do the state’s bidding – Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc – and share your data with the commissars (how do you think Sir Keir Stürmer was able to round up all those “far right” types so quickly?); and b) those platforms that decline to do the state’s bidding and have to be punished and eventually closed down.

So, by order of the state, Rumble is not available in France, and Telegram’s founder sits in a gaol cell facing twenty years in prison. It is no coincidence that the consolidation of the once decentralised Internet into “platforms” has led to the death of free speech.

Conservative activist Chris Rufo predicts a rough ride for the free flow of information as a result:

What comes next? Conservatives in Brazil and elsewhere fear that pro-censorship institutions will move from soft to hard power—that they will “dismantle democracy to save democracy.” We can see this transition in real time, from soft versions of censorship, such as politically motivated fact-checking, to more aggressive means, such as restricting the accounts of dissidents, to the most extreme form: arrest and expropriation, which has already become a reality in countries such as England and Brazil.

Fraser Myers warns at Spiked,

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.

Planet-wide, the situation is rapidly becoming a revealing test of how many people want to think for themselves.