Over the weekend, France arrested Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. Telegram is a messaging platform, and although the reason for the arrest is not yet fully public, the charges seem to be related to the spread of illicit material on the service (terrorism, drug trafficking… etc).
Immediately, we saw a wave of protests over the social web, led by Musk with worries that it was an attack on “free speech.” Maybe. Maybe not. In fact, this move will likely move us toward a world with more free speech… by forcing companies like Telegram, Meta (WhatsApp, Facebook), X/Twitter or even Apple to increase and hasten their adoption of encryption and privacy-respecting technologies.
Contrary to popular belief (mine included), Telegram is lacking dramatically from a privacy perspective. Group messages (which, for me, is the use case for Telegram) are NOT encrypted, and most one-to-one messages aren’t either. In other words, Telegram is just like Twitter, Facebook, or most of the web: everything is public and accessible by anyone, including, of course, Telegram’s teams…
It turns out that, in France and the US, companies have requirements in terms of what they can (or can’t) “host” and serve to users. This means, for example, that they MUST take down copyrighted content or other illegal content (child pornography… but also, in some cases, hate speech), provided that they “technically” CAN.
Telegram, as it does not enforce end-to-end encryption, sees all the traffic from groups (and many of the direct messages!). It means they CAN see it and could moderate it very well. They just decided not to do it… putting them in the cross-hairs of several prosecutors, including some in France, apparently.
Why do I say this is good news for free speech? Because it means that the business decision not to enforce end-to-end encryption is now a liability. Of course, many benefits exist for companies that do not enforce end-to-end encryption: content is MUCH easier to monetize with ads when you know what it is about! It’s also easier to create recommendation algorithms or curated feeds to increase engagement… etc.
As a final note, I want to insist that I am obviously for free speech, maybe even more than what is currently “legal” in France or the US (am I allowed to say it?). I am also not naive, and I know that the biggest threats to free speech are tech-platforms, their algorithms or their leaders who are all too happy to censor those with whom they disagree.