Sumantra Maitra
One of my pet peeves is to observe and chronicle how the 200-year idea of “liberal democracy” is disappearing before our very eyes due to the various new social conditions arising from technological innovations. I have written about it several times, but we have added one more data point to the idea that “free speech” as a concept is functionally dead or dying in the Euro-Atlantic. The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France on trumped-up charges that his platform “facilitated” human trafficking and pedophilic activity.
I say “trumped-up” because we have seen previous instances of actual sexual grooming and other such criminal deviance on social media platforms before (and even currently), but none of their founders have been arrested. No, the real reason is that Telegram, like X, or previously RarBG, or Pirate Bay, is committed to an old-school, mid-’90s throwback idea of zero censorship and total freedom of speech—a callback to a time when the internet was imagined to be the ultimate high-tech frontier of Utopia. That dream is dead: Durov refused the Europeans’ demands to crack his app, and is now facing the consequences.
Tucker Carlson conducted an interview with Durov a while back, and tweeted it out again following the arrest.
Carlson would know. His own life is now on the line: consider that the Department of Justice has begun a broad criminal investigation into Americans who have worked with Russia’s state television networks. This is an easy way to tamp down on any dissenting voices, such as those of Carlson or Elon Musk; if carried out, the effect would be chilling. That’s the aim. The same goes for the anti-X crusade in Brazil and Europe. X is ostensibly the only platform to provide zero censorship, and thus alternative viewpoints. The Telegram arrest is just a practice run.
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