French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, founder and head of the Telegram messenger platform, in Paris on August 24, acting on a search warrant issued by the OFMIN, an office in charge of the fight against violence inflicted on minors. OFMIN is carrying out a preliminary investigation on Durov for crimes extending to fraud, drug trafficking, cyber-harassment, and apology for terrorism. The juridical basis is that Durov, by refusing to “moderate” the contents in his messaging service, and not cooperating with the police, is complicit in the crimes.
Fabrice Epelboin, a well-known specialist in social networks and also professor at the Institute of Political Sciences, gave an interview this morning to France-Info, on the arrest.
Epelboin indicated that with more than 1 billion users, “Telegram messaging can host forums, and blogs, which is its dominant use in territories like Russia.” “While most of the content is not reprehensible, at the margins, you can find drug trafficking, prostitution of minors, arms sales, a whole host of illegal things,” he said. He explained that the reason why there is no moderation, is because Telegram is based on a free, non-revenue model, “so there’s absolutely no means to pay for moderation.”
Epelboin focuses his attacks on the Digital Services Act of the EU, which is currently heading a European offensive to crack down on crime in the social networks. “Even Facebook, which makes considerable profits, doesn’t have the resources to provide for the moderation of content that grows far too big every day.” He points out that “the Chinese, who have around 800 million on Chinese social networks, have over 2 million moderators. That gives you an idea of the wage bill Facebook would need to meet the demands of China! And yet today, Europe demands unfailing responsiveness.”
One should note as well that until last June, the EU was trying to impose another such policy on the social networks, called Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) which would have forced messenger services to scan every exchange occurring on their platforms. The policy met with great opposition from several quarters, in particular from Signal, the other encrypted social network, which threatened to withdraw entirely from Europe if that policy were adopted.
Clearly, the EU is using what is a real problem to try to kill all the opposition networks to the Western “order” which are using Telegram to communicate. This would also be an enormous problem for the Russians, all of whom, including the army, use Telegram for normal communications.
According to some analysts, the EU, i.e., the Western oligarchy, is trying to bring things to the level of a global showdown with the social networks. Isn’t this “another notch in the garrote coming into place?” wonders Euractiv. On August 12, EU Commissioner for Internal Market and Services Thierry Breton sent a letter to Elon Musk, “urging him to ensure that X properly moderates,” i.e. removes, “content from its network, after the debate it had organized with U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.”
Epelboin said, “In all likelihood, we’ll be moving towards either a closure of Telegram, or more accurately, a censorship of Telegram, which will set a serious precedent, or move toward agreements that will enable the judiciary, intelligence services and police to spy on Telegram users, which will naturally cause its downfall to the benefit of other platforms.”
