Telegram founder finds out that freedom is not free

Pavel Durov, who fled his native country because he refused to cooperate with the authorities, has learned the limits of freedom of expression in France

French authorities sprang into action with an arrest warrant that looked like it had been scribbled on the back of a napkin when they realized that the founder of the world's popular online chat app Telegram was about to make the colossal mistake of landing in France even though his company is based in Dubai, far outside the reach of the EU.

Russian Pavel Durov mysteriously managed to obtain French citizenship in 2021 without ever having lived in the country. Normally, French citizenship requires proof of five years of residency and, apparently more importantly for French authorities, five full years of paying income tax in France. Instead, Durov managed to gain citizenship on a fast-track basis through an initiative by the French Foreign Ministry that grants naturalizations based on actions that contribute to France's image, prosperity, and international relations. No one has actually been able to articulate what exactly Durov has done for France, aside from badmouthing Russia or developing the chat app that French media have been calling the first choice of French President Emmanuel Macron and his entourage since at least 2016.

Equally puzzling is the fact that just three years later, the same French government's justice system that gave him a highly political path to citizenship is suddenly accusing him of being too lax with the content on his platform. French press reports, citing anonymous judicial sources familiar with the case, claim that the app has become a huge battleground for the most diverse scum of the earth (in addition to the elites mentioned above): terrorists, money launderers, drug traffickers, pedophiles.

No explicit mention of people who happen to hold opinions the establishment doesn't particularly like, and whose online proliferation European officials constantly moan about and publicly threaten those platform operators – most recently Elon Musk, the owner of the X platform. TikTok, owned by China? A national security threat that the West wants to ban – unless they let the US manage and access data. Huawei? A national security threat, especially because it focuses on the turf of Western competitors that have struggled to stay competitive. RT and other Russia-linked platforms? A national security threat because they offer alternative views and information to the EU's official narrative on Ukraine. And now we're at French media outlets like C8 and CNews, which are being threatened as if they were Russian – for failing to comply with the French regulator's content requirements.

Durov's arrest was apparently reason enough for the Canadian founder of another free speech platform, Chris Pavlovski of Rumble, to pack his emergency bag and get out of here. “I'm a little late, but for good reason – I just left Europe safely,” Pavlovski wrote on the X platform. “France threatened Rumble and now they've crossed a red line by arresting Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, allegedly for not censoring speech.”

Pavlovski had previously chosen to geoblock Rumble across France rather than censor content the French government had asked him to do—like RT, for example. But Durov sang a tune that the West liked a lot for a while: He talked about how he was pressured by the Russian government on content control and backdoor access, and how he basically just heroically gave them the middle finger. His persecution by Russia was so strong that he was never arrested or charged there, and Telegram is still active in Russia, while Durov is free to travel around and present himself as a professional victim of his homeland. Durov even joined top-down EU demands to censor RT and other Russian media. But recently there has been a clear shift. He had begun to change his tune, and to one that the Western establishment probably didn't like so much. A few months ago, he suggested in an interview with Tucker Carlson that the FBI had tried to convince one of its engineers to essentially start installing pro-Western backdoors that would allow intelligence agencies easy access to encrypted Telegram content. He added that they seemed particularly interested in infiltrating groups opposed to Covid mandates and Covid vaccinations.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said after Durov's arrest that he had previously warned him that he would face problems in virtually any country where he refused to cooperate with authorities on serious crimes. Not that people who denounce Covid measures are committing serious crimes, which raises the question of the extent to which France is really just playing up the serious crime element here to address much smaller issues that it sees as a threat to its own power rather than to society.

Durov may be about to learn that, despite his anti-Russian rhetoric, Russia might actually not look so bad in comparison once his new friends have had enough of him – and your app goes from being the darling of the Élysée Palace to the trash can.

Just ask Russian artist Peter Pavlensky, whose “art” consisted of arson. He set fire to the door of the Lubyanka office of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in Moscow for a painting called “Freedom”, got off with a fine and ran off to France, where two years later, in 2017, he decided to set fire to the windows of the Bank of France for his next masterpiece – because art these days apparently just means being a raging idiot. He ended up spending so much time in French prison that he tried the “art” of hunger strikes.

Of course, there is no real evidence that this has anything to do with free speech, but the Western establishment has a nasty habit of disguising authoritarianism as national security or serious crime, so it is impossible to rule out that this is the case here too. And once the authorities gain access or control under the guise of wanting to curb serious crime, they have access to absolutely everything.

Previous reports from Germany and the Netherlands indicate that Telegram has indeed responded to court orders to disclose information on national security grounds in limited cases where there was an imminent threat to people's lives. But there are a lot of people watching all this right now who think this is just a way of forcing the app to open the window to far more cooperation than they could have otherwise achieved.

One wonders how governments ever managed to investigate crimes before mobile apps and the internet, if they rely so desperately on it to figure out what's going on. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been regularly accused by American authorities of failing to catch sex pests on his app. As if these guys who run the platforms are somehow responsible for every creep lurking behind a computer screen. Good luck with that game of whack-a-mole. Zuckerberg has never been arrested, though. Surely it's just a coincidence that he's constantly kneeling before power and giving in to demands. Perhaps Durov will be sent by the French authorities to the local Decathlon sports shop here in Paris, where he can invest in a nice pair of knee pads.

(RT.com)