Respectable voices shouldn’t fall for Elon Musk’s hysterical claims that the arrest of Pavel Durov, the messaging service’s billionaire CEO, is part of a global jihad against speech rights
Thank you for elucidating this complex subject. I would add that in any group of people, there will be those who use whatever power they have to protect other people (mostly men) who engage in child sexual abuse because, tragically, there are so many who do engage in child sexual abuse. This is why it is so difficult to curb it. At every level of criminal justice systems and in every level of government, there are predators who work to protect each other, and they are usually successful in doing so. And they can count on the naivete of too many people to go along with what they do and rationalize it by invoking freedom of speech, freedom of association and other civil rights.
And the same goes for violence against women being tolerated within the legal system. Which is another reason we need more female judges.
There seems to be a group of people that 1) happily refer to people they disagree with as pedophiles and 2) vigilantly defend channels on the internet that enable the distribution of child pornography and resist the investigation of it. Hmmmm. Projection?
A few things to consider: 1) Telegram isn’t a social media platform; it’s a messaging platform. ICQ, AIM, and other platforms that were never considered social media shouldn’t be either. The social graph isn’t a crucial aspect of the platform. 2) The design of Telegram is indeed flawed because it doesn’t offer end-to-end encryption, as mentioned in the substack. However, does that automatically make it not a platform for free speech? If it were end-to-end encrypted, what would that change?
Telegram allows you to set up public and private groups. I use it for a real estate group I'm in.
You can also create "channels" that are broadcast like Twitter. They can be public or private.
In neither case are those messages E2E encrypted.
If I set up a group called "Get yer kiddie porn here" and started posting CSAM there, should Telegram have to respond to subpoenas about it? I think yes.
If it were fully encrypted but authorities had evidence of CSAM activity in one, I still think Telegram should have to produce whatever metadata they have, if any.
Whether it’s a ‘social medial’ or other form of tech platform is irrelevant to the argument (& a convenient straw man erected by those trying to defend the indefensible). The point is it is a tech clearing platform for other users to utilize for communication & information sharing, and like most or all other such online platforms, the platform owner is not responsible for the actions of its users. On your second point - it is obvious encryption also is a straw man & has no bearing on whether Telegram should be guilty or not of the actions of other users. More signs of the censors grasping at straws.
I don’t know about French law. I do know, however, that in the American state in which I reside, there is a criminal statute providing that if I knowingly help someone commit a crime, I’m just as guilty as the primary perpetrator. Assume, for example, that I own a bicycle messenger service. The government alerts me that a mob boss habitually uses my service to deliver hit messages. Therefore the government urges me to stop delivering messages for this mob boss. I tell the government to go to hell. The mob boss gives me another hit message, I deliver it, and the targeted individual is murdered. Should it avail me to shrug my shoulders and say, “Not my problem. I’m just the delivery boy”? Won’t I be criminally liable? Yes, it will be censorship, but there are long-recognized historical exceptions to free speech, including incitement to crime. Isn’t Telegram comparable to the bicycle messenger?
The word “knowingly” says it all. Unless you can prove that, then there is no guilt. The govt merely making a claim of lawbreaking is not sufficient. Show me all the heads of Telcos that have been arrested for all the crime conducted on their lines over the last 120 years pls.
If I understand the article correctly, though, the French government found unencrypted child porn on Telegram, alerted Durov to that problem, asked for his cooperation in stopping the use of Telegram for that illicit purpose and in bringing the perpetrators to accountability, and he refused to cooperate. If all that is true, wouldn’t Durov’s knowing state of mind be a reasonable inference?
Not necessarily. There are likely many good reasons why he either (a) was suspicious of / knew their claims were fallacious, &/or (b) had other valid reasons not to / why he couldn’t or wouldn’t cooperate. And again, the govt making specious claims for other ulterior motives is a constant in their battle to restrict speech, which is why the burden is & should always be on them to prove why such heavy handed tactics or intrusions on individual rights are necessary. and in NO circumstances is mere failure to cooperate make the provider of a platform equally culpable for someone else’s crimes or meriting this kind of attack & prosecution. They’re clearly trying to send a message of force, which is obvious to any fair minded & honest observer. This is precisely the type of illogic & illiberalism that exposes the censors for what & who they are (& unpopulist as such for pushing such illogic; hence my original comments).
Tell us you’re a fascist censor without telling us. 😂😂 But then again we shouldn’t be surprised, bc unpopulist is basically a front for radical leftists who label anyone who disagrees with them as ‘illiberal’ or ‘far right’ and seeks to shut down or censor them accordingly. So of course they would invite a member of the Stanford Internet Observatory - one of the leaders of global totalitarian censorship that has disbanded in disgrace because of how odious its ACTUAL illiberal tactics were - to defend an indefensible prosecution by French censors. No one is buying this ‘accountability for crimes’ straw man.
Which part - that you’re a band of leftists, that you show your fascist underbelly when you defend fascist censorship, or that you platform other illiberal censors from the disbanded & discredited SIO?
It's really weird to respond to "Everything you said was false" with "Which part?" What do you think "everything" means? Yes, everything you restated in your latest reply is false: We are not leftists; we don't defend fascist censorship; and we don't platform illiberal censors.
This is patently whack-a-mole. The difficult question will be what to do about someone offering the same unmoderated public spaces as Telegram, but from space, where you can't arrest them.
Get real. The Brazilian Supreme Court judge has way exceeded his authority. Not to mention that the primary point of free speech RIGHTs (not laws, RIGHTS) is so that anyone can criticize their government about anything at any time. Period. No exceptions. It's a very easy concept to grasp.
That is how free societies survive. Did Hitler ban criticism of government? Yes. Did Stalin? Hell, yes. Mao? Of course. Maduro? You bet. Are you seeing a trend? Legitimate governments can take the heat. Totalitarian governments are the ONLY governments that push censorship. Anyone who supports this is a totalitarian at heart. It's 1984 all over again.
Did you get confused and think that this article was about Elon Musk's feud with Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes rather than about Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's arrest in France?
Yes, you're right. I like to think that my comment got posted to the wrong Substack, but the greater likelihood is that I screwed up.
I'll stick with what I said, even if I said it in the wrong place. It's true enough that there needs to be censorship to some extent. I'm uber sensitive to this, because of the incredible amount of government censorship of political speech and opinion. No free society can survive that. And, no, using proxies like FB, Twitter, Goggle, etc, doesn't make it OK.
Call me jaded, but I don't trust governments judgement on much of anything. That's not an ideology, that's a conclusion, based on decades of experience. So, is the prosecution of Durvov truly for the sake of protecting children, or is the primary motive the protecting of the political establishment? Given that the political establishment in France and elsewhere is highly suspect concerning its censorship motives, I wouldn't jump to any conclusions.
Remember, governments that can eavesdrop on child molesters can also eavesdrop on opposition candidates, and they will. Count on it. We've had that right here in the good old USA. I don't want to diminish the importance of protecting children, but in my lifetime, I've never seen such a concerted effort by political establishments to control what we see, hear, and say.
Did it ever occur to you that governments are on record for having violated their constitutions and their own laws when it comes to eavesdropping on people who AREN'T child molesters? Which is most of us.
Yes, it's nice to know that governments are working to protect our children from child molesters *(except for when it's government officials who are the child molesters), but who do we turn to when it is the government that is molesting us?
And be honest, you have no idea what the specific laws or policies are that Durov is accused of violating. How about if we hear from both sides first, and THEN try to sort things out. Do us all a favor and do not presume that governments are full of wonderful people, and no bad ones. We all know better.
Please reread this Substack carefully. It is very specific in explaining why in this kind of situation freedom of speech is a fig leaf for permitting child sexual abuse.
"Totalitarian governments are the ONLY governments that push censorship. "
I appreciate the comment below that acknowledges the inappropriateness of this post in relation to Ms. Diresta's article (how many times does a poster say, "I screwed up"?--it's really refreshing), but I'd like to point out how dangerously untrue the assertion above is.
Many non-totalitarian governments exercise censorship, and do so routinely. We live in an era where pornography is commonly available, but when I grew up in the US it was illegal to publish pornography. You will still hear profanities censored with bleeps on TV because they are prohibited by the government. US citizens have unusually strong protections against censorship because of the First Amendment, but the Constitution does not protect speech that is incitement to criminal acts, and it allows punishment for libelous speech and prosecution for breaches of national security, etc. Perhaps you would label the US a "totalitarian" state simply because it censors in this way, but that would make your claim circular. In this respect the US is not an outlier: this is the norm.
I agree that the primary interest that people have in free speech laws is license to criticize government, and I think it would be fair to say that censorship of political speech is a hallmark of totalitarianism. But where you say below, "governments that can eavesdrop on child molesters can also eavesdrop on opposition candidates, and they will," I think you are taking an unreasonably absolutist position. The idea reduces to the notion that because the tools of law enforcement can be deployed against the interests of the people we should not allow law enforcement to deploy tools even in the interests of the people. The society that follows from that would be subject to unchecked criminal predation that would undermine the interests of the people to a far greater degree (and would resemble in many ways the arbitrary rule of power we associate with totalitarian states, just not from government).
The premise of Ms. Diresta's article is that Durov's arrest seems likely to be based on his refusal to cooperate with an investigation into child sexual abuse when he possessed relevant information. Although his rationale may invoke a principled anti-censorship stance, there is no public good served by protecting child sexual abuse: the motivation is clearly to maintain the guarantee that "we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments" in order to maintain Telegram's client base and robust profitability.
There is nothing that threatens principled positions more severely than the illegitimate use of them as pretexts to serve unprincipled goals. "Totalitarians at heart" thrive on this. If you want to preserve the purchase of an anti-censorship principle I think you need to avoid absolutist positions that allow it to be used for socially destructive ends. And this will unfortunately mean accepting the fact that when when we try to optimize applying rules in real life, we make mistakes and fail to live up to the ideals we're hoping to realize--it comes with the territory of the real world.
It appears that your handle has overcome your critical thinking and reading comprehension skills. If you want to be a “radical individualist” then first get your facts and logic straight.
Thank you for elucidating this complex subject. I would add that in any group of people, there will be those who use whatever power they have to protect other people (mostly men) who engage in child sexual abuse because, tragically, there are so many who do engage in child sexual abuse. This is why it is so difficult to curb it. At every level of criminal justice systems and in every level of government, there are predators who work to protect each other, and they are usually successful in doing so. And they can count on the naivete of too many people to go along with what they do and rationalize it by invoking freedom of speech, freedom of association and other civil rights.
And the same goes for violence against women being tolerated within the legal system. Which is another reason we need more female judges.
There seems to be a group of people that 1) happily refer to people they disagree with as pedophiles and 2) vigilantly defend channels on the internet that enable the distribution of child pornography and resist the investigation of it. Hmmmm. Projection?
A few things to consider: 1) Telegram isn’t a social media platform; it’s a messaging platform. ICQ, AIM, and other platforms that were never considered social media shouldn’t be either. The social graph isn’t a crucial aspect of the platform. 2) The design of Telegram is indeed flawed because it doesn’t offer end-to-end encryption, as mentioned in the substack. However, does that automatically make it not a platform for free speech? If it were end-to-end encrypted, what would that change?
Telegram allows you to set up public and private groups. I use it for a real estate group I'm in.
You can also create "channels" that are broadcast like Twitter. They can be public or private.
In neither case are those messages E2E encrypted.
If I set up a group called "Get yer kiddie porn here" and started posting CSAM there, should Telegram have to respond to subpoenas about it? I think yes.
If it were fully encrypted but authorities had evidence of CSAM activity in one, I still think Telegram should have to produce whatever metadata they have, if any.
Whether it’s a ‘social medial’ or other form of tech platform is irrelevant to the argument (& a convenient straw man erected by those trying to defend the indefensible). The point is it is a tech clearing platform for other users to utilize for communication & information sharing, and like most or all other such online platforms, the platform owner is not responsible for the actions of its users. On your second point - it is obvious encryption also is a straw man & has no bearing on whether Telegram should be guilty or not of the actions of other users. More signs of the censors grasping at straws.
I don’t know about French law. I do know, however, that in the American state in which I reside, there is a criminal statute providing that if I knowingly help someone commit a crime, I’m just as guilty as the primary perpetrator. Assume, for example, that I own a bicycle messenger service. The government alerts me that a mob boss habitually uses my service to deliver hit messages. Therefore the government urges me to stop delivering messages for this mob boss. I tell the government to go to hell. The mob boss gives me another hit message, I deliver it, and the targeted individual is murdered. Should it avail me to shrug my shoulders and say, “Not my problem. I’m just the delivery boy”? Won’t I be criminally liable? Yes, it will be censorship, but there are long-recognized historical exceptions to free speech, including incitement to crime. Isn’t Telegram comparable to the bicycle messenger?
The word “knowingly” says it all. Unless you can prove that, then there is no guilt. The govt merely making a claim of lawbreaking is not sufficient. Show me all the heads of Telcos that have been arrested for all the crime conducted on their lines over the last 120 years pls.
If I understand the article correctly, though, the French government found unencrypted child porn on Telegram, alerted Durov to that problem, asked for his cooperation in stopping the use of Telegram for that illicit purpose and in bringing the perpetrators to accountability, and he refused to cooperate. If all that is true, wouldn’t Durov’s knowing state of mind be a reasonable inference?
Not necessarily. There are likely many good reasons why he either (a) was suspicious of / knew their claims were fallacious, &/or (b) had other valid reasons not to / why he couldn’t or wouldn’t cooperate. And again, the govt making specious claims for other ulterior motives is a constant in their battle to restrict speech, which is why the burden is & should always be on them to prove why such heavy handed tactics or intrusions on individual rights are necessary. and in NO circumstances is mere failure to cooperate make the provider of a platform equally culpable for someone else’s crimes or meriting this kind of attack & prosecution. They’re clearly trying to send a message of force, which is obvious to any fair minded & honest observer. This is precisely the type of illogic & illiberalism that exposes the censors for what & who they are (& unpopulist as such for pushing such illogic; hence my original comments).
Tell us you’re a fascist censor without telling us. 😂😂 But then again we shouldn’t be surprised, bc unpopulist is basically a front for radical leftists who label anyone who disagrees with them as ‘illiberal’ or ‘far right’ and seeks to shut down or censor them accordingly. So of course they would invite a member of the Stanford Internet Observatory - one of the leaders of global totalitarian censorship that has disbanded in disgrace because of how odious its ACTUAL illiberal tactics were - to defend an indefensible prosecution by French censors. No one is buying this ‘accountability for crimes’ straw man.
Literally everything in this reply is false.
Which part - that you’re a band of leftists, that you show your fascist underbelly when you defend fascist censorship, or that you platform other illiberal censors from the disbanded & discredited SIO?
It's really weird to respond to "Everything you said was false" with "Which part?" What do you think "everything" means? Yes, everything you restated in your latest reply is false: We are not leftists; we don't defend fascist censorship; and we don't platform illiberal censors.
All demonstrably false. So among other things of your being wrong on, it apparently includes the meaning of true & false.
Did anyone see in this post anything but ad hominem and bald accusations? I didn’t see anything distantly resembling a reasoned counter argument.
Yes, that well describes the typical unpopulist article. Thank you. 👏🏻
This is patently whack-a-mole. The difficult question will be what to do about someone offering the same unmoderated public spaces as Telegram, but from space, where you can't arrest them.
The fact remains that you need to reread the article. Nice try, though.
Get real. The Brazilian Supreme Court judge has way exceeded his authority. Not to mention that the primary point of free speech RIGHTs (not laws, RIGHTS) is so that anyone can criticize their government about anything at any time. Period. No exceptions. It's a very easy concept to grasp.
That is how free societies survive. Did Hitler ban criticism of government? Yes. Did Stalin? Hell, yes. Mao? Of course. Maduro? You bet. Are you seeing a trend? Legitimate governments can take the heat. Totalitarian governments are the ONLY governments that push censorship. Anyone who supports this is a totalitarian at heart. It's 1984 all over again.
Did you get confused and think that this article was about Elon Musk's feud with Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes rather than about Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's arrest in France?
Yes, you're right. I like to think that my comment got posted to the wrong Substack, but the greater likelihood is that I screwed up.
I'll stick with what I said, even if I said it in the wrong place. It's true enough that there needs to be censorship to some extent. I'm uber sensitive to this, because of the incredible amount of government censorship of political speech and opinion. No free society can survive that. And, no, using proxies like FB, Twitter, Goggle, etc, doesn't make it OK.
Call me jaded, but I don't trust governments judgement on much of anything. That's not an ideology, that's a conclusion, based on decades of experience. So, is the prosecution of Durvov truly for the sake of protecting children, or is the primary motive the protecting of the political establishment? Given that the political establishment in France and elsewhere is highly suspect concerning its censorship motives, I wouldn't jump to any conclusions.
Remember, governments that can eavesdrop on child molesters can also eavesdrop on opposition candidates, and they will. Count on it. We've had that right here in the good old USA. I don't want to diminish the importance of protecting children, but in my lifetime, I've never seen such a concerted effort by political establishments to control what we see, hear, and say.
Maybe the concerted effort is due to the explosion of child exploitation on outlets such as Telegram? Did that ever occur to your conspiratorial mind?
Did it ever occur to you that governments are on record for having violated their constitutions and their own laws when it comes to eavesdropping on people who AREN'T child molesters? Which is most of us.
Yes, it's nice to know that governments are working to protect our children from child molesters *(except for when it's government officials who are the child molesters), but who do we turn to when it is the government that is molesting us?
And be honest, you have no idea what the specific laws or policies are that Durov is accused of violating. How about if we hear from both sides first, and THEN try to sort things out. Do us all a favor and do not presume that governments are full of wonderful people, and no bad ones. We all know better.
Please reread this Substack carefully. It is very specific in explaining why in this kind of situation freedom of speech is a fig leaf for permitting child sexual abuse.
"Totalitarian governments are the ONLY governments that push censorship. "
I appreciate the comment below that acknowledges the inappropriateness of this post in relation to Ms. Diresta's article (how many times does a poster say, "I screwed up"?--it's really refreshing), but I'd like to point out how dangerously untrue the assertion above is.
Many non-totalitarian governments exercise censorship, and do so routinely. We live in an era where pornography is commonly available, but when I grew up in the US it was illegal to publish pornography. You will still hear profanities censored with bleeps on TV because they are prohibited by the government. US citizens have unusually strong protections against censorship because of the First Amendment, but the Constitution does not protect speech that is incitement to criminal acts, and it allows punishment for libelous speech and prosecution for breaches of national security, etc. Perhaps you would label the US a "totalitarian" state simply because it censors in this way, but that would make your claim circular. In this respect the US is not an outlier: this is the norm.
I agree that the primary interest that people have in free speech laws is license to criticize government, and I think it would be fair to say that censorship of political speech is a hallmark of totalitarianism. But where you say below, "governments that can eavesdrop on child molesters can also eavesdrop on opposition candidates, and they will," I think you are taking an unreasonably absolutist position. The idea reduces to the notion that because the tools of law enforcement can be deployed against the interests of the people we should not allow law enforcement to deploy tools even in the interests of the people. The society that follows from that would be subject to unchecked criminal predation that would undermine the interests of the people to a far greater degree (and would resemble in many ways the arbitrary rule of power we associate with totalitarian states, just not from government).
The premise of Ms. Diresta's article is that Durov's arrest seems likely to be based on his refusal to cooperate with an investigation into child sexual abuse when he possessed relevant information. Although his rationale may invoke a principled anti-censorship stance, there is no public good served by protecting child sexual abuse: the motivation is clearly to maintain the guarantee that "we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments" in order to maintain Telegram's client base and robust profitability.
There is nothing that threatens principled positions more severely than the illegitimate use of them as pretexts to serve unprincipled goals. "Totalitarians at heart" thrive on this. If you want to preserve the purchase of an anti-censorship principle I think you need to avoid absolutist positions that allow it to be used for socially destructive ends. And this will unfortunately mean accepting the fact that when when we try to optimize applying rules in real life, we make mistakes and fail to live up to the ideals we're hoping to realize--it comes with the territory of the real world.
It appears that your handle has overcome your critical thinking and reading comprehension skills. If you want to be a “radical individualist” then first get your facts and logic straight.