Telegram founder finds out that ‘freedom’ isn’t free

Pavel Durov, who fled his birth country refusing to cooperate with authorities, has discovered the limits of free expression in France.

French officials have sprung into action with an arrest warrant that seemed to have been scribbled on the back of a napkin when they realized that the founder of the globally-popular online chat app, Telegram, was about to make the colossal mistake of landing in France, despite his company being based well out of the EU’s reach in Dubai.

Russian Pavel Durov mysteriously managed to get French citizenship in 2021 without ever even living in the country. Normally, French citizenship requires proof of five years of residency, and seemingly more importantly to French authorities, five full years of paying income tax in France. Instead, Durov managed to get fast-tracked citizenship through a French Foreign Ministry initiative that awards naturalization based on some kind of action that contributes to the image, prosperity, and international relations of France. No one has been able to actually articulate what exactly Durov has contributed to France beyond badmouthing Russia, or having created the chat app that French media have long qualified as the top choice of French President Emmanuel Macron and his entourage since at least 2016.

Just as equally puzzling is the fact that just three years later, the judicial branch of the same French government that gifted him with a highly political shortcut to citizenship is now suddenly accusing him of taking an overly laid-back approach to his platform’s content. French press reports have been citing anonymous judicial sources close to the case, alleging that the app has turned into a giant free-for-all for assorted scum of the earth (in addition the aforementioned elites): terrorists, money launderers, drug traffickers, pedophiles.

No explicit mention of people who happen to just have opinions that the establishment doesn’t particularly like, and whose online proliferation European officials are always whining about and threatening these platform operators about publicly – the most recent being X platform owner Elon Musk. TikTok, owned by China? National security threat that the West wants to ban – unless they hand over data management and access to the US. Huawei? National security threat, mostly for honing in on the turf of Western competitors who struggled to compete. RT and other Russia-linked platforms? National security threat offering alternative views and information to the EU’s official narrative on Ukraine. Now we’re down to French media outlets like C8 and CNews being threatened like they were Russian – because they haven’t fallen in line with the French regulator’s content demands.

Durov’s arrest was apparently enough to incite the Canadian founder of another free speech platform, Rumble’s Chris Pavlovski, to grab his go-bag and get the heck out of dodge. “I’m a little late to this, but for good reason – I’ve just safely departed from Europe,” Pavlovski wrote on the X Platform.”France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech.”

Pavlovski previously opted to outright geoblock Rumble across France rather than censor content that the French government had asked him to – like RT for example. But Durov was singing a tune that the West really liked for a while, about how he was pressured by the Russian government over content control and backdoor access and how he basically just flipped them off heroically. His persecution by Russia was such that he was never actually arrested or charged with anything there, and Telegram is still operational in Russia while Durov is free to go around the world promoting himself as a professional victim of his homeland. Durov even fell right in line with top-down EU demands to censor RT and other Russian media. But there has been a significant shift recently. He had started to change his tune to one that probably wasn’t such a crowd pleaser for the Western establishment, suggesting a few months ago in an interview with Tucker Carlson that the FBI tried to convince one of his engineers to basically start installing Western-friendly backdoors that would allow intelligence services easy access to encrypted Telegram content. He added that they seemed particularly interested in infiltrating groups that opposed Covid mandates and jabs.

Former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev said in the wake of Durov’s arrest that he previously warned him that he’d have problems in virtually any country where he didn’t want to cooperate with the authorities on major crimes. Not that people denouncing Covid mandates are committing major crimes, which makes you wonder how much of this is really just France playing up the major crime element in order to tackle much lesser things that they consider a threat to their own power rather than to society.

Durov may now be on the verge of learning that despite his anti-Russian rhetoric, Russia could actually start looking not too bad by comparison the minute that his new pals decide that they’re fed up with him – and your app goes from being the toast of the Elysee to the trash bin.

Just ask that Russian artist, Peter Pavlensky, whose “art” consisted of arson. He sets fire to the door of the Lubyanka office of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in Moscow, for a tableau called “freedom,” walks away with a fine and runs off to France where two years later, in 2017, he decides that for his next masterpiece he’d set fire to the Bank of France’s windows – because art these days just means being a raving douchebag, apparently. He ends up spending enough time in French prison to try his hand at the “art” of hunger striking.

Of course there’s no actual proof that this has to do with free speech, but the Western establishment does have a nasty habit of cloaking authoritarianism in national security or serious criminality, which makes it impossible to rule out that being the case here, as well. And once the authorities get access or control under the pretext of wanting to curtail serious crime, they then have that access for absolutely everything.

Based on prior reporting out of Germany and the Netherlands, Telegram has indeed been responsive to court orders for disclosure of information on national security grounds in limited cases of immediate threat to life. But there’s no shortage of people watching all this right now and thinking that it could just be a way to use coercion to push open the window to a lot more cooperation from the app than they would have been able to get otherwise.

Makes you wonder how governments ever managed to investigate crimes before mobile apps and the internet came along, if they’re so desperate to rely on them to figure out what’s going on. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has routinely been accused by American officials of not reeling in sex pests on his app. As if these guys running 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 genuflecting to power and caving to demands. Perhaps Durov will be directed by French authorities to the local Decathlon sports store here in Paris where he can invest in a nice pair of knee pads.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of DTNZ.