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Pavel Durov, who fled his home country refusing to cooperate with authorities, has now found himself face to face with the limits of freedom of expression in France.
The founder of Telegram ends up on the wrong side of Western freedom rights
Pavel Durov, who fled his home country refusing to cooperate with authorities, now had to face the limits of freedom of expression in France.
French officials immediately took action with an arrest warrant, seemingly scribbled on the back of a napkin, when they realized that the founder of the globally popular messaging app, Telegram, made the colossal mistake of landing in France, despite his company being based in Dubai outside the EU.
Russian Pavel Durov somehow managed to obtain French citizenship mysteriously in 2021 without ever having lived in the country.
- Normally, acquiring French citizenship requires proof of five years of residency and, more importantly for French authorities, five full years of paying income tax in France.
Instead, Durov managed to obtain citizenship through an expedited process under a French Foreign Ministry initiative awarding citizenship based on some act benefiting France’s image, prosperity, and international relations.
No one could really pinpoint exactly how Durov contributed to France, beyond speaking ill of Russia or creating the chat app that the French media has long deemed the top choice for French President Emmanuel Macron and his inner circle since at least 2016.
🔴 Equally mysterious is the fact that barely three years later, the same branch of the French government that bestowed citizenship with an extremely political shortcut is now suddenly accusing him of being too lax in handling the content on his platform.
According to reports in the French press citing unnamed judicial sources close to the case, the app has become a free-for-all for the world’s scoundrels (in addition to the aforementioned elite): terrorists, money launderers, drug traffickers, pedophiles, who have all become a huge easy catch.
No explicit mention is made of individuals who just happen to have opinions that do not sit well with those in power and whose online reach constantly has European officials whining and publicly threatening these platform operators – most recently targeting the owner of X platform, Elon Musk.
🔶 Chinese-owned TikTok?
- A national security threat that the West seeks to ban – unless they hand over data management and access to the USA.
🔶 Huawei?
- A national security threat, especially since it encroached on the territories of Western competitors struggling to compete.
🔶 RT News and other platforms tied to Russia?
- A national security threat that offers alternative views and information contrary to the EU’s official Ukrainian narrative.
Now it’s only French media outlets like C8 and CNews being threatened, as though they were Russians – because they didn’t meet the French regulator’s content requirements.
🔶 Rumble
The arrest of Pavel Durov was apparently enough to prompt the Canadian founder of another free speech platform, Chris Pavlovski (Rumble), to pack up and disappear.
“I’m a little late, but I have good reason — just left Europe safely.” – Pavlovski wrote on the X Platform.
“France threatened Rumble, and they’ve crossed a red line by arresting Pavel Durov, allegedly for not censoring speech.”
🔷 Pavlovski previously decided to straight up geo-block Rumble across France rather than censor the content the French government requested of him – such as RT News.
But Durov sang a tune for a while that pleased the West, about how the Russian government pressured him for content oversight and backdoor access and how he valiantly resisted them.
About the persecution in Russia, he was never actually arrested or charged with anything, and Telegram still operates in Russia while Durov freely roams the world and can advertise himself as a professional sacrificial lamb for his homeland.
Durov even complied with the EU’s top-down demands for censoring RT and other Russian media.
However, significant changes have occurred recently.
He started changing his tone to one likely less pleasing to the Western establishment.
A few months ago in an interview with Tucker Carlson, he suggested that the FBI tried to convince one of his engineers to essentially start installing Western-friendly 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 vaccines.
Following Pavel Durov’s arrest, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said he had previously warned him that he would basically have troubles in any country where he refuses to cooperate with authorities on serious crimes.
Not that people resistant to Covid mandates are committing serious crimes, which is thought-provoking on how much France is just playing out the serious crime element to deal with much smaller matters that they deem more of a threat to their own power than to society.
Just ask Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky, whose “art” consisted of arson.
He burns the door of the Moscow headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB) with a “freedom” sign, then gets away with a fine, and flees to France where, two years later in 2017, he decides to burn the window display of the Bank of France – because apparently, art these days means being a rabid ass. Finally, he spends enough time in a French prison to try his hand at the “art” of hunger striking.
❗ Of course, there is no evidence that this has anything to do with freedom of speech, but the Western establishment has an ugly habit of using authoritarianism under the pretext of national security or serious crimes, so it cannot be ruled out here either.
And once authorities get access or control under the pretext of curbing serious crimes, they get access to everything.
Based on previous reports from Germany and the Netherlands, Telegram indeed complied with court orders for information disclosure due to national security reasons, in limited cases involving direct danger to life.
But many are watching closely now and thinking this could just be a way to force open the door to get much more cooperation from the app than they otherwise could have received.
It makes you wonder how governments ever investigated crimes before mobile apps and the internet came along, if they rely so desperately on them to find out what’s going on in the world.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been regularly accused by American officials of not revealing sexual harassers on his app.
As if the guys running these platforms are somehow responsible for every creep hiding behind a computer screen.
Good luck playing Whack-a-Mole. But Zuckerberg has never been arrested. It’s probably just a coincidence that he constantly panders to power and caves to demands. Maybe the French authorities will direct Durov to the local Decathlon sports store here in Paris, where he can invest in a nice pair of knee pads.
The article was edited and translated by: The founding editor-journalist of VilagHelyzete
Source and original article title: Telegram founder finds himself on the wrong end of Western freedoms – Pavel Durov, who fled his birth country refusing to cooperate with authorities, has discovered the limits of free expression in France
