On Saturday, we reported on the CEO of messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, getting taken into custody at a French airport by government officials, on an arrest warrant accusing the website of failing to moderate content that was allegedly used in criminal activity.
This is a concerning threat to free speech when a government will do something like that and it's a threat to any social media platform. If they can do it to Telegram they can to it to X. We've already seen various efforts to go after Elon Musk. But this type of move is especially troubling when a CEO is arrested like this.
EU Warns Elon Musk to Behave Ahead of His Donald Trump Interview and Musk Is Not Having It
X CEO Elon Musk spoke out against the arrest, tweeting "Free Pavel" and posting some of what Durov talking about the changes on X and the importance of being pro-freedom of speech from a Tucker Carlson interview in April.
Tucker Carlson also spoke out on Durov's behalf.
Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram. But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech. It was a western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member, that locked him away. Pavel Durov sits in a French jail tonight, a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies. Darkness is descending fast on the formerly free world. Here’s our interview with Durov from several months ago:
One of the things that Durov told Carlson during the interview seems to foreshadow what was to come. Durov revealed what happened with the FBI with a Telegram engineer. He said they wanted the engineer to work for them to be able to put a backdoor into the system to allow people/governments/intelligence agencies to be able to access users' data. He said the FBI even showed up at his house.
So that's already concerning.
But Musk also pointed out the troubling comments from the Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz, who had no understanding what free speech was about saying that there was "no guarantee to free speech for misinformation or hate speech."
We already know that the Biden-Harris has had no compunctions against censorship. What Tim Walz says in that clip and the ignorance he shows makes things even more concerning when he doesn't even know the first thing, and thinks you can crush free speech if it is "misinformation or hate speech."
That's incredibly dangerous seeing what we are now seeing afoot in this world. It's a present danger to our free speech, one that Harris-Walz would likely make so much worse.