Pavel Durov’s arrest in Paris has scared the CEOs of other pro-free speech platforms — and rightly so.
French-Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov founded Telegram in 2013, following Russia’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2011. Now one of the largest communication tools in the world, Telegram uses encryption, similar to Signal, to prevent bad actors — whether individuals or corrupt governments — from tracking your communications. Telegram is central to everyday life in places like Russia, Ukraine, and India. In fact, Russia had a problem with the app because Ukrainians were using it for military communications. That’s how secure the encryption is.
You would expect societies that claim to champion freedom of speech and privacy to embrace this app, while totalitarian governments that want to control their people's private communication would do everything they could to ban it. Yet it wasn’t Russia, Iran, or China that targeted Durov — it was France.
They are coming for Musk, they are coming for Rumble, and they are coming for you. This is not about your digital safety. It is about their quest for power.
Authorities arrested Durov at an airport in Paris earlier this week. The Russian embassy in Paris demanded an explanation from the French government. In response, the French government stated that Durov “was detained by the National Anti-fraud Office over the alleged facilitation of various crimes, including terrorism, narcotics, trafficking, and fraud.” They further accuse him of “allowing an incalculable number of offenses and crimes to be committed” on Telegram “for which he did nothing.” In short, they are charging Durov as an accomplice to the crimes others have committed while using his app.
In the United States, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects social media companies from being charged as accomplices to most crimes committed on their platforms. Though French and European law doesn’t fall under Section 230, their double standard for platforms that comply with their censorship campaigns is clear. For example, “60 Minutes” reports that New Mexico's attorney general is accusing Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg of enabling child sex abuse and trafficking on its sites. According to the attorney general’s undercover investigation, Facebook and Instagram's algorithms created a marketplace for the sexual exploitation of children, and Meta enabled adults to find, message, and groom minors, soliciting them to sell pictures or participate in pornographic videos.
Will France hold Mark Zuckerberg accountable for enabling child pornography on his platform? Why was Durov arrested for crimes that Meta has repeatedly been proven to facilitate? Could it be because Durov’s product counters government censorship, while Meta has openly complied with it?
Europe has been rapidly metastasizing into a global center for censorship, and the EU's Digital Services Act was the final nail in the coffin of what’s left of free speech on the continent. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley rightly called the Digital Services Act “one of the greatest threats to free speech that we have today around the world,” forcing social media companies to flag and report content that the EU deems harmful.
Shielded in dull, bureaucratic language, the Digital Services Act empowers the globalist EU government to censor any speech as it sees fit. It emboldens people like Margrethe Vestager, a Danish politician serving as executive vice president of the European Commission for “A Europe Fit for the Digital Age,” to threaten Elon Musk’s X with fines for refusing to comply with its censorship packaged as EU “guidelines."
Europe has been rapidly metastasizing into a global center for censorship.
Durov’s arrest has scared the CEOs of other pro-free speech platforms, and rightly so. Rumble founder and CEO Chris Pavlovski said, “I’m a little late to this, but for good reason — I’ve just safely departed from Europe. France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech.”
“Rumble will not stand for this behavior and will use every legal means available to fight for freedom of expression, a universal human right,” Pavlovski added. “We are currently fighting in the courts of France, and we hope for Pavel Durov’s immediate release.”
Elon Musk is also concerned. “It is vital to the support of free speech that you forward X posts to people you know, especially in censorship-heavy countries,” he posted on X (formerly Twitter). He's saying that X posts are going to be hidden in countries like France, and the only way you can see them is if a person from a non-censored country directly sends them to you. Is Facebook held to this standard of censorship too?
Alexander Vindman, who was a key witness against Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial, said this in response to Durov’s arrest:
While Durov holds French citizenship, is arrested for violating French law, this has broader implications for other social media, including Twitter. There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo [and] malign influence [and] a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be nervous.
That’s a threat, coming from a Democratic candidate for Congress no less.
Is there really a growing intolerance for platforming “disinformation”? There may be within the elite ruling class but not with the American people.
This year at Blaze Media, we are breaking multiple records in our company’s history. We have a bigger impact now than when I was at Fox News. This is especially astonishing given our Facebook numbers. We can’t get any traction on Facebook, but this is not a new battle. It always silences our voice, and your voice, during an election season. And it’s only going to get worse.
Durov’s arrest is not an isolated issue. We have felt the rumblings of Europe's seismic shift toward censorship for years, but Durov’s arrest is the first major crack in the ground. The ruling elites want you to fall through the cracks along with him until they and their cronies are the only ones left above ground. They are coming for Musk, they are coming for Rumble, and they are coming for you.This is not about your digital safety. It is about their quest for power.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published on TheBlaze.com.
