Telegram founder charged with wide range of crimes in France

Has played a role, sure, enough to talk about it in public, but I expected to see what the prosecutor thought would be enough for a court.

Telegram was also blocked in Russia for a period of time while they argued about compliance [1].

I think it is far more likely that Russia understands that Durov is one of the most influential people that acts as an emissary to their country. His past altercations around VK and subsequent compliance with various investigations in Russia probably mean they have at least a semi-amicable relationship now. The reality is that, for better or for worse, Telegram is widely used by a large number of people. In just the same way that US agencies can compel investigations with US companies, I'm sure that Russia exerts some amount of control on Telegram for investigation purposes. But this is what I would expect about any messaging platform that isn't fully E2EE.

The fact of the matter is that Telegram's flagship product for many people is NOT the messaging system, it's the non-encrypted channels system, which has been used widely by various people to act as a social network. This system is valuable to investigate for a lot of people. Encrypted messaging aside, companies usually are compelled to do a minimum amount of compliance work with authorities for jurisdictions they operate in.

[0]: https://t.me/durov/179

[1]: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/whats-...

The main takeaway here is that Durov is not being arrested strictly because his platform contains illegal material. He is being arrested because (allegedly)

- he is aware of the illegal material, and - he refuses to cooperate with law enforcement to remove that material.

So the French authorities are charging him with being complicit in a lot of this stuff.

Platforms like Signal can get away with this because they are properly E2E encrypted, and cannot identify illegal content. Telegram, on the other hand, has decryption keys for the messages and media sent in group chats, meaning they can identify and remove illegal content if they choose to.

Yeah the only difference is that one person is right and the other person is wrong.

> The recent acknowledgement by Zuckerberg that the Biden/Harris regime pressured them into censoring information should give you some thought about what is 'disinfo'.

Of course they fucking did, and so they should have. Also, you think the current Republican controlled senate hasn't applied any "pressure" to obtain this statement right now for their bullshit committee?

Facebook's statement doesn't say they shut down anything factual, just that they took down a bunch of covid content "including humour and satire". The shit they took down was still disinfo. The entire anti-vaccination movement is libertarian propaganda (why do you think there's no anti-anaesthetics movement? It's made by the same companies, used about as widely and is orders of magnitude more dangerous).

> In other words don't be too quick in condemning channels which allow voices outside the desired narrative to be heard because the day might come than you need to step outside it

It's patently obvious that Telegram is a Russian operation. The messages aren't really encrypted, the founder isn't really in exile, and oh it just so happens that all the most batshit crazy conspiracy theories originate there.