The arrest of Telegram owner Pavel Durov in Paris for dubious allegations that his media empire is aiding criminality in social media has raised serious concerns about Western democracies assaulting freedom of speech, which is a basic tenet these countries claim to uphold. Laws are quickly being crafted that will subject social messaging apps to the control of Western governments, blurring boundaries between democracies and autocrats.
Western democracies have been churning laws that aim to force social messaging app owners to control them under the guise of fighting online criminality. One app, Telegram, has shown that both autocratic and democratic ones prefer to impose conditionalities that will force app owners to surrender control and jeopardise the security of their clients.
Pavel Durov is a Russian-born digital services entrepreneur who created a social messaging app, Telegram, in 2006. While in Russia, he was constantly pestered and hounded by authorities to disclose the identities of political enemies of the state, and he sternly refused.
During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which ousted the sympathetic Russian president, the Russian authorities saw Telegram playing a major role in mobilisation and communications that brought anti-government elements together, leading to the coup d’etat of the duly elected president. Western democracies had supported and hailed the Ukrainian civilian popular putsch as a decisive breakthrough against autocratic governments.
Under pressure to compromise Telegram’s integrity, Pavel was forced to leave Russia in 2014 and decamped to the UAE, where he was given citizenship and USD 75 million to boost his business operations.
Even in the UAE, Pavel had to confront authorities’ efforts to control his app under the ruse of flushing out criminal activities. Telegram voice calls are encrypted, but the UAE has blocked them because of what is dubbed national security.
Pavel became a French citizen to free himself from EU and US travel restrictions. How he became a French citizen is still a mystery. Some say French President Emmanuel Macron volunteered his citizenship to Pavel so the social media mogul would shift his headquarters to France, while others say Pavel requested it.
“…The Russian billionaire and social media magnate stepped off a private jet near Paris, arriving from Azerbaijan, last Saturday and was promptly arrested. French police had noticed his name on the passenger list.
Child pornography, drug trafficking, extremist propaganda, organized crime — Druov is not accused of any of these offences.
Instead, prosecutors charged him with 12 offences related to allegations of his messaging app, which is well known for its encryption options, being complicit in allowing users to facilitate such illicit activities — and for refusing to co-operate with law enforcement.
French authorities had been investigating Durov and Telegram for months. But his arrest came as a surprise and, critics say, couldserve as a warning to the heads of other tech companies who areseen as being too soft on moderating objectionable content and activity on their platforms…” Nick Logan/CBC NEWS Reported.
However, it is a long-held custom in France to award citizenship to individuals who have immensely contributed to humankind, and Pavel deserves such recognition.
Within the EU, many vaunted democracies have been ramping up the fight to control social messaging apps by coughing out the Digital Services Act. This law requires messaging app owners to cooperate with authorities, which is censorship. Huge fines are also on the cards to force compliance.
Unmasking the Digital Services Act is an effort to curb criminality such as terrorism, child phonographic materials, human and illicit drug trafficking and identity theft.
Behind the scenes, western democracies have been working closely together to stamp out misinformation that is rooted in election interference. Election misinformation is said to hail from autocracies, with Russia, China, Venezuela and Iran topping the list. Social messaging apps are increasingly considered a national threat that needs to be nipped in the bud.
The finer lines between fending off misinformation, stoking antisemitism, racism, drug trafficking, unauthorised sales of encrypted software and illegal commerce on platforms such as Telegram, X and TikTok. Ironically, legal actions against Telegram and Pavel are discriminatory as neither X nor TikTok has faced similar political persecution.
Within the EU, legal actions tended to be civil litigation. Still, in the case of Telegram and Pavel, they have taken a criminal nature, signalling the political stakes are very high.
Geopolitical elements keep rearing their ugly hydra in Pavel’s case since he is a Russian citizen. This is very interesting because while in Russia, the authorities treated him as a dissident, but now are voicing anger that freedom of expression is under assault. Pavel considers himself an iconoclast who has strenuously refused to cave into authorities’ whims to compromise his popular app, which has almost one billion downloads.
Why is encryption a big deal?
One of the most popular features among Telegram’s 950 million active users is its encryption.
Not all of its features are entirely, or “end-to-end” encrypted. Communication in its group chats and channels can be read by Telegram, said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizenlab.
“Similarly, messages between users are not end-to-end encrypted by default.”
But its “secret chat” option is end-to-end encrypted, which prevents Telegram, or anyone apart from the intended recipients, from reading the messages. Nick Logan/CBC NEWS.
Of interest, Telegram is a platform both Russia and Ukraine use to relay their official versions of their war. Telegram does not meddle in their reportage. Telegram is the most convenient social messaging app the world has seen. It allows users to share large files that neither X nor WhatsApp can. It has fewer restrictions than most messaging platforms, which promotes freedom of expression and speech.
Authorities worldwide, regardless of their democratic banners, seem eager to fight online criminal activities, which is why they rely heavily on messaging platforms to seek facilitative help. Here is a problem: What the authorities do is set a double standard. It is like asking a hotelier to be responsible for his client’s actions.
This is not dissimilar to asking banks to curb banking criminality—of which they, too, are victims—or taking to task taxi drivers for their clients’ criminal activities.
True, social messaging platforms can flag criminal activities, but alerting authorities will deter potential criminals from using them to achieve their nefarious aims. Such criminals will seek alternative options to stay ahead of the authorities. The cost-benefit analysis favours authorities in finding technologies that will trace criminal activities without imposing the legal onus upon owners of social messaging platforms.
As more and more owners of social messaging apps are criminalized, the entrepreneurial spirit in this endeavour will falter. Few digital developers will see the wisdom in investing their time, intellectual energy, money, and other resources in a field authorities treat with suspicion and hostilities, imposing a huge burden upon owners to police their apps.
At the same time, their ethos promotes freedom of speech and expression. There must be another way of dealing with digital criminality without penalizing digital developers who have enriched our lives in untold ways.
