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Notes -
An appeal to the dissident right from the Russian opposition about the arrest of Pavel Durov
The founder of Telegram was arrested in France and faces 20 years in prison. The charges ostensibly surround the use of Telegram for criminal activity, but the Guardian notes:
At the height of Twitter censorship, probably 95% of the Dissident Right was banned from Twitter and all went to Telegram. The only contingent of the DR left on Twitter were the Bronze Age Pervert-types who extoled "The West" and race realism but otherwise promoted a philosemitic undercurrent among the right-wing. This all changed with Musk's acquisition of Twitter/X and now nearly all of the banned are back on that platform.
Yesterday Elon Musk also gave exposure to the Telegram founder's claim that the FBI tried to recruit one of his engineers to introduce vulnerabilities into the application through open-source dependencies.
It's hard to overstate the fragility of "freedom of speech", although admittedly I mostly care about expression and information-sharing related to the topics that I consider true and important. And those are the political topics which are only actually threatened at this point. The political persecution of Durov not only threatens Telegram, basically what became the last "internet Ghetto" of the Dissident Right, but it puts pressure on all platforms to conform to EU censorship standards, which are becoming more stringent year after year. TikTok is likewise being banned for not sufficiently curtailing speech according to the interests of the Jewish lobby.
You have the EU censorship regime, the international NGO apparatus like ADL and Hope not Hate which put enormous political and financial pressure on platforms and governments to censor this speech. The current state of Internet discourse is also proof positive of Elite Theory. Only someone like Elon Musk could do what he did with X and (for now) get away with it. Musk himself has related growing scrutiny and lawsuits by the federal bureaucracy against his businesses as retaliation for his "free speech" policy in governing X, and I think he's almost certainly correct.
It really is, at this point, one man standing against the impending total-internet censorship of the Dissident Right. People were making fun of Musk for overpaying for X, but it's an important lesson, a lesson already known by many, that you can't put a price on memetic control over the collective consciousness.
Oh my god... I can forgive boomer Westerners believing this sort of stuff, but if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.
To a large extent this is self-inflicted. The writing was on the wall for a pretty long time now, and technologically nothing stands in the way of making an uncensorable service, but all these alt-tech CEOs keep making the same single-point-of-failure architectures. I suppose the issue is you can forget about making money from the uncensorable variant, but then again, I don't understand how Telegram is making any money to begin with.
The thought did occur to me that Elon's takeover is just bait to get dissidents to come out of hiding, so they can give the final blow when convenient, but I'm hoping that by now people are smart enough to not put all their eggs in one basket.
The dissidents the Western governments target and the dissidents the Russian government targets are usually not the same. So when you are targeted by Russia but not France, it's easy to believe that "sure they do it in the West too but Not Like That".
If you're a non-progressive (pisses off the West) libertarian (pisses off Russia) then sure it's all the same to you.
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