On Sunday afternoon, while I was taking a nap, my phone started buzzing with notifications. In the various groups where I share my views and words, I saw that Pavel Durov had been arrested by the French police. There wasn’t much to analyze yet, but alarms were raised, and theories began to circulate, and those theories were not far from reality.
Pavel is practically accused of every digital crime one can commit, from criminal association to pedophilia. My eyes kept scrolling down, unable to believe all the accusations. Could even 10% of what they’re questioning him about be true? And unfortunately, the worst blind person is the one who doesn’t want to see.
Detractors claimed that Telegram served totalitarian regimes and handed over data, when in reality, the opposite is true, as this social network served as a reference point when people in Belarus were protesting for their civil rights. They also alleged that Telegram collaborated with the Russian government to evade sanctions or promote disinformation campaigns, but if anyone takes the trouble to watch the 60-minute interview with Tucker Carlson, they’ll see that one of the reasons Pavel left his homeland (Russia) is because the government pressure simply became unbearable; Putin took over VK because Pavel refused to be part of it.
So, we already know that Russia has no interest in Telegram, nor is it anti-democratic, as the movements have already demonstrated, which leads us to the question of whether the French really have interests with Telegram.
And my first response after reading Macron’s statements was precisely that they were seeking his arrest until we read that Macron is an avid user of this social network, but also that it was Macron himself who Pavel to obtain his French passport. So, let’s ask a long question:
What leads a European liberal democracy to arrest the CEO of a social network with charges that could easily apply to other social networks?
Try a simple experiment: take out the word Telegram and insert your social network of choice in the accusatory libel. It has the same effect, and the previous question arises again, and I’d like to offer an alternative perspective on this process. To this day, and I’ve mentioned this before in other posts in this same place, but I’ll emphasize it: we no longer have democracy as such. You can forget about the liberal style that was once promised to us or that we learned about in our educational institutions. This has been replaced with Dataism.
Dataism and How Pavel Doesn’t Cooperate
Dataism is a new form of governance. The word data comes from the Latin datum, which means "to give," meaning we, the citizens, give our data to the companies that manage social networks. These companies, while using us as a product for other companies, also see governments trying to dip their spoon into the pot, so they start talking about speech regulations, hate content, among other accusations, to maintain a clean social network.
I’m guilty first. In the old days, when the chief censors operated in the former Soviet Union (as Coetzee tells us), folders were created with the data of suspects, documenting their revolutionary activities, and when the time came, measures could be taken that affected the welfare state.
Today, this type of persecution no longer exists, but by handing over my data, companies no longer talk about tracking me, since we’ve given them free access to our location and GPS, in addition to exposing our lives on every platform; today, profiles are made, and now there’s a marketing department that creates behavior profiles and bombards me with products and services that might interest me.
The government’s intrusion into social networks has become so great that now they had to react, showing a sort of repentance. As I write this, I find it really hard to react to the letter sent by Meta (signed by Zuckerberg himself) in which he regrets the censorship carried out during the pandemic. And I vividly remember the hundreds of people whose accounts were censored, rightly or wrongly, for not aligning with the government’s scientific stance.
And Telegram?
Telegram doesn’t hand over data and paid the price. It refused to do so in the past and stood against the current regime, against dataism. The French justice system wants Pavel to spend time in prison for daring to use encrypted products that don’t allow them to listen to/see/read their possible suspects. The KGB would blush at such a move. And the most ironic thing is that a person who flees his own country for not wanting to cooperate with values contrary to freedom is now arrested by a country that was once the center of debates on liberty, fraternity, and equality, where they rose up against the oppressive regime.
I don’t know how the process will continue on French soil, and I also don’t know if the Russians are really using USDT networks to move sanctioned money. I only know that this kind of arrest proves and gives reason to those who argue that freedom, as we knew it, no longer makes sense.
And I don’t know what else to tell you, my friend.
Unfortunately, I have no conclusion. I wish I could end this article and give you hope that justice will respond to see what they’re accusing him of, but it would be a lie on my part. I can tell you, however, that if you’re reading this and have a NOSTR account and use bitcoin as part of your economy, you’re on the right path.
Sites like Stacker News and others, as well as protocols like NOSTR, will gain greater importance as we open our eyes to fight the regime that seeks to abolish privacy as a human right. Today we can fight, and it doesn’t require much of us, other than to promote what we are doing now.
And I’ll end by asking the same question that @FmpPerspective did: are we still allowed to ask questions?