Arrest Of Telegram CEO Marks A Step Toward Authoritarianism

Reading the corporate media coverage of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest in Paris this week, you’d think he was a Kremlin spy or an international terrorist, not the founder of a popular social media app with nearly a billion users.

The charges against Durov — whom the media never fail to inform us was born in Russia — include “complicity in the distribution of child pornography and selling of drugs, money laundering, and a refusal to cooperate with law enforcement,” according to The New York Times. Nearly every news outlet said something similar, that Durov is “complicit” in serious crimes like child pornography, creating the impression that Durov is somehow personally involved in nefarious criminal enterprises — or that Telegram itself is a criminal enterprise.

In reality, Telegram and Durov are under investigation in France because the social media app maintains a more rigorous commitment to free speech than most of its competitors (with the possible exception of X under Elon Musk, who has spoken out against Durov’s arrest as an affront to free speech). 

What we’re seeing with the arrest of Durov, in other words, is the criminalization of free speech by a state, in this case Emmanuel Macron’s France, under the pretext that lightly moderating content on big social media platforms, as Telegram does, is tantamount to complicity in whatever the users of the app say or do. This is nonsense of course. No one, not even the French president, would hold Mark Zuckerberg liable for everything Facebook or Instagram users post. The purpose of targeting Durov in particular is to bring Telegram under the control of the state so that it can be used as an instrument of propaganda and social control.

We see this across the West. Once-liberal democracies are now effectively controlled by regimes that are increasingly open in their hostility to free speech and freedom of conscience. In Britain during the recent riots, police went door-to-door arresting and jailing citizens who happened to post disfavored opinions and memes on social media. Here in the United States, every day it seems we learn more about how the federal government compels social media companies to do its bidding.

In fact just this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Congress admitting that Facebook helped the feds implement a censorship regime designed to suppress Americans’ right to free speech in 2020 during the Covid pandemic and in the run-up to the presidential election. We already knew from the Twitter Files that this was happening, but Zuckerberg’s letter confirms just how pervasive and widespread the federal censorship effort was.

That this could happen in America, which unlike France and Britain has a First Amendment that’s supposed to protect citizens from censorship and viewpoint discrimination, is an indication of how illiberal the regimes of the West have become. If the White House and the executive branch can bully social media companies into censoring private citizens engaged in political speech, then the First Amendment is a dead letter in America.

None of this is really in dispute at this point. It is a trend so obvious that you’d have to be dishonest or in willful denial to argue it isn’t happening. The question is: why? What changed that free speech is now seen as a grave threat to the social order — even to the preservation of democracy — in the West? 

The short answer is that the once-liberal democracies have been taken over by administrative bureaucracies, or what Curtis Yarvin has called an institutional oligarchy, which views not just free speech but free society itself as a mortal threat to its rule. This bureaucracy — what we might also call the administrative or deep state — is totally unaccountable to the people it seeks to rule, and considers them subjects to command or cogs to manage, not citizens from whom they derive their just powers. Indeed, it’s the prospect of accountability that sets the bureaucratic regime against the people, and rightly sees them as a real threat to its rule.

The key thing to understand about this institutional oligarchy is that you cannot vote it out of power. The people who run the regime were not voted into office, and cannot be voted out. The bureaucracy exists above and outside of electoral politics as they are normally understood, and so resorting to electoral politics to overthrow the regime will only get you so far. Consider Brexit, or, closer to home, what the executive branch agencies did to the Trump administration. It didn’t matter that the American people voted Trump into office, the machinery of the federal bureaucracy immediately went to war against Trump, hamstringing his administration from day one.

A more recent case in point will suffice to illustrate what I mean. Back in France, where Durov has been arrested but not yet formally charged with a crime, Macron has triggered a political crisis by refusing to appoint a prime minister from the coalition that won the most parliamentary seats in last month’s snap election.

Macron called for the snap election following European Parliament elections that saw France’s right-wing National Rally party win the biggest share of the vote. The results of the snap election left France’s National Assembly divided into three roughly equal blocks: left, center, and right. An ad-hoc coalition of every left-of-center party, led by the New Popular Front, won the most seats in the assembly and therefore has the right to form a new government. (This left-wing alliance, it should be noted, formed solely for the purpose of thwarting the right-wing National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, which it barely managed to do.)

Yet Macron is blocking the formation of a new government in what can fairly be called a soft coup: the losers of the election, Macron and his allies, are refusing to cede power to the winners. Despite losing national elections, Macron’s party is still in power. The only reason the French president has given so far is that, in his view, appointing a prime minister from the New Popular Front would lead to an immediate no-confidence vote, the collapse the new government, and the “weakening” of the country.

Understand what this means: across the West, the people are not really in charge. And if the people are not in charge, why should the state allow them to post whatever they want on social media? Why should they be allowed freedom of speech?

In fact, if the people are not in charge, then allowing them to say whatever they like is actually a great threat to the regime. If free speech is allowed to flourish, the truth of the situation might come out. The people might realize what has happened, that an unaccountable bureaucracy has usurped the democratic process. And so social media apps like Telegram and X must be brought under the control of the regime. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in his recent speech endorsing former President Donald Trump, “governments and oppressors don’t censor lies, they don’t fear lies. They fear the truth, and that’s what they censor.”

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.