Free speech is a cornerstone of liberty. That’s why the latest attack on free speech is so troubling. Pavel Durov, the founder of the popular messaging service Telegram, was charged with numerous alleged crimes Wednesday in Paris, France, but was released on a bail of $5.5 million.
Telegram is used by upward of a billion users around the world, both for its ease of use and promise of security and privacy.
It is those latter promises that have long put Telegram at odds with governments around the world. Tyrannical governments don’t like that political dissidents have long used the service to keep people informed.
“Telegram, and other encrypted messaging services, are crucial for those intending to organize protests in countries where there is a severe crackdown on free speech. Myanmar, Belarus and Hong Kong have all seen people relying on the services,” free speech group Index on Censorship noted in 2021.
Ordinary people, too, just use the service for the same reasons people use Twitter or Facebook or other social media services: to connect with people, get and share information, find entertainment and so on.
Of course, on a platform used by so many people and with protections in place to facilitate some degree of anonymity, there are bad actors 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 are responsible for abuse of that platform.”
Durov left his native Russia in 2014 over censorship issues with the government of President Vladimir Putin.
Yet it appears the French government thinks now is the time to punish Durov for overseeing a service used by a large proportion of the global population. Durov is being held directly responsible for the misuse of the Telegram platform by others.
For perspective on this, 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 notes that Telegram has long filed numerous reports yearly on child sexual abuse and other criminal activities, which throws cold water on the idea that the platform welcomes such abusive activities.
Telegram, in this way, is little different than U.S.-based social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Which is why it is important to keep watch on how this case is resolved.
The Telegram crackdown came the same week that Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Facebook’s parent, sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee noted that officials from the Biden-Harris administration, “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor” content during the COVID-19 pandemic, “including humor and satire.”
And on Aug. 17, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced he was shutting down the platform in Brazil after that country’s Supreme Court ordered him to censor posts not in favor with the country’s socialist government.
Soave said such recent actions by Zuckerberg and Musk are good for free speech and “there’s a reason Silicon Valley is in America.” Despite the recent problems, our social media companies are not located in “authoritarian countries in South America and the Middle East. And even Europe, the bastion of enlightenment values, is very unfriendly to free speech.”
But he cautioned a threat close to home is California’s overzealous efforts to regulate artificial intelligence, which we criticized in a July 31 editorial.
France, a NATO ally, ought to drop its attack on Durov and Telegram. And the United States needs to restore a similar hands-off attitude toward social media.
