The arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has ignited an age-old debate about free speech. Should X’s Elon Musk be worried?
Reaction to France’s arrest this weekend of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has, no surprise, broken along mostly predictable lines — with one side, for example, arguing that France took the billionaire into custody in response to widespread criminality that was enabled via his encrypted messaging app. Meanwhile, free speech advocates on the other side like Edward Snowden and Alexei Navalny advisor Leonid Volkov have blasted France’s move as an attempt to enjoy some measure of control over a digital bastion of free speech, given that Durov’s app exerts minimal oversight over its 900 million users worldwide.
I will not attempt an analysis of the wisdom of either of those points of view here, because I do, in fact, understand where both sides are coming from.
Certainly, free speech is a core American ideal, and I will forever and always regard with deep suspicion anyone whose dismissiveness about that ideal causes them to say obviously deranged things like free speech is mostly “an obsession” of white men today (in the words of ex-Twitter VP Jason Goldman, which were shared in Time magazine).
It is vital to the support of free speech that you forward ???? posts to people you know, especially in censorship-heavy countries— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2024
Something else worth pointing out, specifically for American readers: Most people like to describe the First Amendment as “granting” Americans freedom of speech, whereas a strict reading of the amendment’s language actually leads one to a different conclusion.
