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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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An appeal to the dissident right from the Russian opposition about the arrest of Pavel Durov

Just like what’s happening in France today. In 2017, Putin accused Telegram of helping terrorists and pedophiles and tried to pressure Pavel Durov to provide the FSB with keys to decrypt private messages.

But after months of struggle and rallying, we managed to defend Telegram. It still operates in Russia today, virtually free of censorship. Although it’s in an increasingly precarious position.

Since then, Putin opened a criminal investigation against me, and my entire team was forced into political exile. We won the battle but lost the war.

Because back in 2017, we were naive and thought it was a uniquely Russian problem. We actually thought Putin was a backwater dictator preventing Russia from joining the family of free nations. Unfortunately, we couldn’t have been more wrong.

As it turned out, Putin was the trailblazer. He set the example for the rest of the Western political class with his censorship, destruction of privacy, and surveillance. It turned out, the West was simply trailing behind.

I’m now in exile in Latin America, witnessing the same silencing of people unfolding under Lula’s rule in Brazil. Reading about people getting arrested for tweets in the UK, and watching Pavel Durov get arrested in France. Something even Putin didn’t dare to do at the time.

These are not isolated issues. The political class is waging a global war against the people. It’s not just Pavel who came under attack in France last night; it’s our privacy and freedom of speech.

... I implore the global right to apply their resources to support Pavel Durov. We have what it takes to save Telegram and finally start winning.

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:

The app was also used widely by far-right agitators plotting anti-immigration rallies in England and Northern Ireland in the wake of the stabbing of three children at a Southport dance class last month.

The anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate concluded that Telegram had become the “app of choice” for racists and violent extremists and “a cesspit of antisemitic content” with minimal moderation or effort from the app to curb extremist content.

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.

This is a very interesting and ominous development. I strongly doubt Durov will actually serve serious jail time. The interesting questions then are:

Exactly what concessions will France / the EU / whoever wring out of Durov and Telegram in exchange for his release?

What should we take from the fact that this level of lawfare has not yet been used (at least not visibly) against any of the other social networks or messaging platforms? Are they all cooperating sufficiently, despite claimed E2EE protections on some things? Do they have some other sort of leverage or protection? Or maybe the powers that be are just afraid of possible backlash, so they're going after Telegram first to see what they can get away with, and if it goes well, further action on other platforms may follow.

Exactly what concessions will France / the EU / whoever wring out of Durov and Telegram in exchange for his release?

If he cuts a deal, we’ll likely never know unless he defects afterwards, which seems unlikely unless he never wants to leave the UAE again.

There are worse places to live in, if you have money.

There are, but he has precedent for trying to cut deals, and the FSB is scarier than the French when it comes to overseas ‘operations’, so I assume he will take it and move on happy and rich. Even when it came to the Russians, after he left he apparently negotiated with them quite extensively.