Free speech is a cornerstone of liberty. That's why the latest attack on free speech is so disturbing. Pavel Durov, the founder of the popular messaging service Telegram, was charged with numerous alleged crimes in Paris, France, on Wednesday but was released on $5.5 million bail.
Telegram is used by over a billion users worldwide, both because of its ease of use and its promise of security and privacy.
It is these latter promises that have long put Telegram at odds with governments around the world. Tyrannical governments don't like the fact that political dissidents have long used the service to keep the population informed.
“Telegram and other encrypted messaging services are critical for those seeking to organize protests in countries where free speech is severely restricted. In Myanmar, Belarus and Hong Kong, people rely on these services,” the free speech group Index on Censorship noted in 2021.
Ordinary people also use the service for the same reasons as Twitter, Facebook or other social media services: to connect with others, receive and share information, find entertainment, and so on.
Of course, on a platform that is used by so many people and has protection mechanisms in place that allow a certain level of anonymity, there are also criminals who use the platform for nefarious purposes.
Accordingly, Telegram responded in a statement that Durov had “nothing to hide” and “it is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the misuse of that platform.”
Durov left his native Russia in 2014 due to problems with censorship by President Vladimir Putin's government.
But the French government now seems to believe it is time to punish Durov for monitoring a service used by a large part of the world's population. Durov is held directly responsible for the misuse of the Telegram platform by others.
To look into this further, we spoke with Robby Soave, a senior editor at Reason magazine and author of “Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future.” Soave points out that Telegram has a long history of filing numerous reports of child sexual abuse and other criminal activity each year, which calls into question the notion that the platform welcomes such abusive activity.
In this respect, Telegram is not much different from US social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, so it is important to keep an eye on how this case is resolved.
The crackdown on Telegram came the same week that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, Facebook's parent company, sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee noting that Biden-Harris administration officials “have repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor content during the Covid-19 pandemic,” “including humor and satire.”
And on August 17, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced the closure of the platform in Brazil after the country's Supreme Court ordered him to censor posts that displeased the country's socialist government.
Soave said such recent actions by Zuckerberg and Musk are good for free speech and “there is a reason why Silicon Valley is in America.” Despite recent problems, our social media companies are not based in “authoritarian countries in South America and the Middle East. And even Europe, the bastion of enlightenment values, is very hostile to free speech.”
But he warned that we too are at risk from California's overzealous efforts to regulate artificial intelligence, which we criticized in a July 31 editorial.
France, a NATO ally, should stop its attacks on Durov and Telegram. And the United States must resume a similarly restrained stance on social media.
