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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.
It is telling, though, that Musk is regularly in Europe and yet has never been arrested, while Durov has avoided it for some time and was arrested upon landing in France for the first time in a while.
In reality, everything that the EU wants Durov to remove from Telegram is stuff Musk’s X already does remove and is happy to remove if a takedown notice is filed.
That's only if you take the EU and US at face value, that they are just really passionate about fighting pedophilia and terrorism, and don't assume that they are also trying to disrupt dissident political communication and organization. Which they obviously are. Musk made headlines just last month by claiming:
So the EU is obviously pressuring Musk to remove content which is not already removed, at least according to his perspective.
There has also been a lot in the news about the EU and US pressuring Musk:
Musk is also a much, much harder target than Durov. They can't arrest him, but they probably can get away within giving X huge fines or banning it, and they have threatened to do both on many occasions since his acquisition of the platform.
The CEO of Rumble has fled Europe. Reminder that this is the "liberal free world."
So you have TikTok- forced divesture clearly going to be banned. Telegram, founder arrested. Rumble CEO has fled Europe. Musk is battling the NGOs and EU as well. This is not just about illegal content, it's about buckling down internet discourse for good.
The problem with Musk is that he's actually pretty well leveraged into their national security and other policy objectives (and to a point, this affects the US as allied with Europe as well); SpaceX's products outperform the Ariane 6, and then there's Tesla (whose cars could be bricked on Musk's whim; they have been before).
I absolutely do believe the Europeans (though really, this is just the Americans by proxy) are stupid enough to try that (the UK has already made overtures in this direction), but Musk is simply too useful to the Americans (who, bipartisanly, have outsourced a significant chunk of their policy goal accomplishing infrastructure spending to him) to allow that, at least for now.
I would suspect Musk of having built in a dead man switch of some sort into some of his products. It's the kind of Bond villain thing I can easily imagine him nerding out about, and I'm sure he understand that riding the edge of "being too useful for the regime" and "being a thorn in their side" requires some sort of insurance policy as some in the regime might think that they can keep the upside if they get rid of him.
Which is also why EU regimes can't just outright ban Twitter or enforce the policies they want upon it; that has a 100% chance of causing a riot (and it's also how the higher-ups already coordinate their human botnets and I don't think they want to give up their brownshirts). That's also why if other countries want to enforce their desired policies they have to target the [domestic] posters themselves.
Banning Twitter wouldn’t cause a riot, this hugely misunderstands the rioters and their motivations.
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