Telegram Is the Appetizer

The main course will be X.

This video is available on Rumble, BitChute, and Odysee.

Last Saturday, the founder of the Telegram messaging app was arrested as he got out of his private plane after landing at Le Bourget Airport. The French National Judicial Police are investigating Pavel Durov for “complicity” in such crimes as drug dealing, child pornography, money laundering, and fraud.

By failing to monitor nearly one billion Telegram users and refusing to let police read their messages, Mr. Durov is said to have committed the crime of permitting crime.

The French have four days – until the evening of Wednesday the 28th – to charge him, and if they do, they could hold him for as long as it takes to prepare their case.

He faces up to 20 years in prison if he is found guilty.

Heads of big social media companies have been asked to appear before legislative investigations, but his is the first arrest.

This is not an enforcement action under the recently passed European Digital Services Act, or DSA. As we will see, that act has the potential for tremendous mischief.

Pavel Durov, Russian by birth, is 39, worth $9 billion, does not drink coffee or alcohol, take drugs, or eat meat. He likes to post photos of himself bare-chested.

A couple once asked him to donate sperm so they could have a child, and he learned there is a shortage of “high quality donor material.” He met the need and now has more than 100 children. He says he is proud to have helped many struggling couples.

Mr. Durov was a math prodigy, and in 2006, when he was 21, he founded a social media site called Vkontakte – or VK – that became known as the Facebook of Russia.

In 2013, when anti-Russian Ukrainians started using VK to organize, the Russian authorities asked him to turn over user information. Instead, Mr. Durov cashed out and fled Russia.

That same year, he founded Telegram, which he advertises as both unmoderated and inaccessible to the authorities.

It is based in Dubai, where Mr. Durov has citizenship. He also has passports from Russia, St. Kitts, and France.

Mr. Durov explained in an interview with Tucker Carlson in April that Telegram has only 30 employees, almost all of them engineers.

He hires only the very best, through online coding contests open to anyone.

Telegram is lean – “Like a Navy Seal team,” he says.

Mr. Durov says he will never compromise user security, unlike other companies, which he says have decryption backdoors for the police.

In 2018, Russia tried to ban Telegram because it is so secure. Now, it is widely used in Russia and Ukraine, both by governments and by dissidents.

The New York Times loves censorship but has faint reservations: “Telegram’s light oversight over content on the platform has helped people living under authoritarian governments communicate, but it has also made the app a haven for harmful content.” The Times knows what’s “harmful.”

“[T]errorist organizations, drug sellers, weapons dealers and far-right extremist groups have used it.” There are apparently no far-left extremist groups.

For the Left, it a strike against Mr. Durov that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says that Moscow is now “ready to provide all necessary assistance and support.”

Edward Snowden warns that “The arrest of @Durov is an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association.”

Robert F. Kennedy says, “The need to protect free speech has never been more urgent.”

Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of the lightly censored video platform Rumble, announced that “I’ve just safely departed from Europe.”

Andrew Torba, who runs Gab, wrote, “I haven’t traveled outside the United States in six years” because “Gab has refused to work with a single foreign government when it comes to requests for user data or censorship of ‘hate speech.’ ”

Who’s happy with the French? Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“He has violated their governance (over the internet) . . . you can’t let anyone violate your governance.”

The Times and the ayatollah see eye to eye.

Catalina Goanta of Utrecht University is with the ayatollah, too.

“Freedom of speech is not absolute, especially when an online service apparently fails to comply with a wide spectrum of laws—drug trafficking, terrorist content, child sexual abuse material, intellectual property violations—in a large number of jurisdictions.”

The problem is not content moderation – Telegram hardly has the staff to do much of that – it’s whether Telegram can ignore police requests. It’s like the phone company telling the cops, “We don’t care about your judge’s order; you’re not tapping our lines.”

There probably is kiddie porn and fraud. The ISIS terrorists who killed 90 people at the Bataclan theater in Paris used Telegram.

I have a glum prediction. The French will let Mr. Durov go if he hands over encryption keys. If he refuses, they will lock him up until they get a guilty verdict. A man with a private plane and four passports is a flight risk. Today, we should find out what happens.

Part of the problem is that although Telegram is supposedly impenetrable to outsiders, Telegram itself can reportedly read messages. Unlike WhatsApp or Signal, which can’t read user messages, Telegram theoretically could rat out users.

My guess is that eventually the fully encrypted apps will be forced to give governments encryption keys. And, for Europeans, crime isn’t just drug-dealing and child porn. It’s speech. European regulations threaten anyone, anywhere whose speech is accessible from within Europe.

If prosecution fails, there is the recently enacted Digital Services Act, or DSA.

It is swathed in the language of censorship. It will “prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation.” It will “protect consumers and their fundamental rights online.”

Worst of all, “the roles of users, platforms, and public authorities are rebalanced according to European values.”

European values are relentless globo-homo and crushing any opposition to the Great Replacement.

I won’t go into the jungle of DSA regulations.

The worst ones apply to what are called Very Large Online Platforms and Very Large Online Search Engines, of which there are 19.

Here are the expected big names, but also some surprises, such as Booking.com, Google Shopping, Pinterest, and the German shopping site Zalando. Telegram didn’t even have to be on this list.

These 19 must censor content, file endless, intrusive reports, publish algorithms, identify “potential harms” and “systemic risks” – whatever they are – and do whatever else the EU tells them.

They have already had to turn over thousands of documents, but so far only one has been formally investigated: X. Its crime was to have failed to track down and exterminate every bit of doubtful information posted after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.

“EU turns up the heat on X over illegal content in wake of Israel-Hamas war.”

Note the date: October 12, 2023, just five days after the attack. Illegal content? Someone claimed President Biden was sending $8 billion to Israel. A video that claimed to be a Hamas attack was a clip from a video game.

There was a fake report that Israel had bombed Gaza’s St. Porphyrius Church.

X uses what it calls “community notes,” or corrections by users, to help flag doubtful information. The company noted that “there had been more than 50 million posts” in the two days after the Hamas attack and that, well, no, “community notes” hadn’t kept up.

No one can keep up with an event like that. I bet the New York Times posted “illegal content.” But under the DSA, Euro-snoops can set whatever standard they want for “misinformation” or “hate.” Violators can be fined up to 6 percent of annual revenue. Repeat violators can be fined 5 percent of revenue per day. In 20 days, that would be an entire year’s turnover.

The head Euro-snoop is Thierry Breton.

He is the guy behind the headline earlier this month: “EU warns Elon Musk ahead of Trump interview to keep hate speech off X.”

A foreigner tells an American billionaire and a former American president what they can talk about. Not so long ago that would have been grounds for declaring war.

Now, I’m sure our rulers are relived that foreign fanatics have the power to squeeze the life out of American companies that refuse to lick their boots. How handy that someone else is taking care of that pesky First Amendment!

Telegram is an appetizer. The main course will be Elon Musk.