The large social media information of the weekend was the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who was taken into custody upon touchdown in Paris on Saturday morning, as a part of an ongoing probe into the position that Telegram has performed in permitting prison exercise to proliferate through Telegram chats.

Telegram, which doesn’t implement end-to-end encryption by default for its chats, has been below investigation over its refusal to implement moderation guidelines to fight prison exercise within the app, whereas it’s additionally refused to cooperate with regulation enforcement on associated investigations.

However as a result of Telegram’s chats should not encrypted, investigators have full entry to the content material being shared in Telegram teams and chats. In order that they know the extent of prison engagement within the app, which Telegram, once more, has reportedly refused to behave upon, regardless of warnings from authorities.

Which is why Durov has now been taken into custody, although free speech advocates want to spotlight this for example of presidency overreach and political censorship, framing Telegram because the sufferer of a marketing campaign by the “censorship industrial complicated” to silence dissenting opinion to their chosen narratives.

When, actually, it looks like Telegram’s personal determination to not encrypt its chats, and supply extra safety for customers, has led to this new motion.

Does that imply that related ranges of prison exercise are in all probability taking place in totally encrypted apps like WhatsApp?

Nicely, in all probability, nevertheless it’s encrypted, so authorities don’t have any method of detecting or implementing such both method. Telegram’s extra lax privateness measures have opened it as much as extra scrutiny, with EU officers now looking for to fight a key supply of prison connection, and certain with quite a lot of proof.

However once more, the arrest of Durov is being derided by conservative teams as an assault on free speech, principally as a result of they themselves have migrated to Telegram for their very own chats.

Again in 2021, X proprietor Elon Musk, who’s now turn out to be some of the influential conservative commentators on the planet, suggested his followers to “Use Sign” as their messaging app of alternative due to his considerations that WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, was sharing data on folks’s non-public chats. There’s no proof to counsel that WhatsApp encryption isn’t safe, however as a part of his long-running beef with Meta, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Musk felt that Sign was a greater choice.

Until he didn’t.

Earlier this 12 months, upon discovering out that NPR CEO Katherine Maher is on the board of the Sign Basis, Musk modified his tune, suggesting that Sign could not truly be safe, which is predicated, once more, on his personal bias in direction of NPR, not on proof.

That then prompted many conservative teams to shift to Telegram as a substitute. Which may be very a lot not as safe as WhatsApp or Sign, and at that stage, already had a rising repute for permitting criminal activity to go unmoderated within the app.

Therefore, now many conservatives are outraged that their messaging platform of alternative is being focused, although it’s extra correlation than causation on this respect.

In response to Durov’s arrest, Telegram has printed the next assertion:

“Telegram abides by EU legal guidelines, together with the Digital Providers Act – its moderation is inside trade requirements and consistently enhancing. Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to cover and travels incessantly in Europe. It’s absurd to assert {that a} platform or its proprietor are accountable for abuse of that platform.”

So Telegram will clearly be trying to put the onus again on customers, versus holding it accountable for the content material that individuals share within the app.

Nevertheless it may very well be a tricky promote for Durov’s authorized crew, contemplating the app’s historical past of refusing cooperation with authorities, and Durov’s personal avoidance of such.

However basically, that is much less about combating a “free speech” platform, and extra about addressing prison exercise. Even when conservative commentators will look to counsel in any other case.    

Word: Rumble’s CEO has additionally left Europe attributable to considerations that he too could also be dealing with arrest.