Tech entrepreneur John Matze said the arrest of Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov is “an existential threat to free speech” that could have global ramifications and set dangerous precedents that put freedoms at risk.
“This should be a huge story. It’s part of the ongoing war on privacy and free speech, globally,” Matze told Fox News Digital.
Matze pointed out that privacy is both a constitutional right for all Americans and a basic human right, and encryption and the ability to communicate with large groups of people should be included.
“This is a very significant threat to both privacy and free speech,” Matze said.
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Durov was arrested at Le Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday as part of a sweeping investigation opened earlier this year. French prosecutors alleged that he allowed criminal activity on the messaging app, and judges ordered him to pay 5 million euros bail. Durov is barred from leaving France pending further investigation.
Allegations against Durov, who is also a French citizen, include that his platform is being used for child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, and that Telegram refused to share information or documents with investigators when required by law.
The first preliminary charge against him was for ”complicity in managing an online platform to allow illicit transactions by an organized group,” a crime that can lead to sentences of up to 10 years in prison and a 500,000-euro fine, the prosecutor’s office said.
Matze believes Durov, who fled Russia in 2014 after refusing to cave to the Kremlin’s censorship demands at his previous company, was targeted by the French government because he “typically does not cooperate with requests from governments for information.”
Matze co-founded Parler in 2018, and the platform became popular among free speech enthusiasts until it was shut down for failing to moderate “egregious content.” He has since launched Hedgehog, a community “built for everyday Americans to get the biggest news of the day and have quality discussion about it,” and remains a staunch defender of free speech.
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“In 2021, my company was deplatformed and taken offline as a result of accusations regarding content moderation, which were untrue. Here we’re seeing a repeat of these circumstances with what’s happening to Telegram, where a very reactionary group of people is putting pressure to both censor content and eradicate privacy from his platform,” Matze said.
“I’m passionate about this,” he continued. “Do social media founders and do social media company owners have legal liability? And should they be responsible for what people are doing on their platform, to the extent that the accusations are saying that they should be?”
Telegram, which reported 700 million monthly users in 2023, uses both artificial intelligence and human moderators to oversee public channels and groups. It is wildly popular in India, where 100 million users reside, and it is used by fewer than 10% of people in France.
“This is important because in the developing world, and in places where there are current conflicts or war zones, there are features in Telegram that let you send broadcast messages out to a large audience of people. You can think of it like sending a message out on a social media feed,” Matze said.
“What that does is, in conflict zones or places where free speech isn’t respected and people are trying to really fight for their lives,” he added. “People are able to get information out really fast to a large group of people and do it mostly unmoderated and without the risk of the local governments, in these regions, being told who these individuals are that are fighting for their freedom and lives.”
French authorities opened a preliminary probe of Telegram in February in response to ”the near total absence of a response by Telegram to judicial requests” for data for pursuing suspects, notably those accused of crimes against children, the prosecutor’s office said.
In addition to being outraged over Durov’s arrest, Matze also believes it points to widespread hypocrisy in the way different messaging platforms are treated.
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“There is a movement in the West where countries are getting more and more aggressive with their hate speech laws and other laws which require more censorship. And so, what’s really strange about this case and is really unique is that they’re making accusations that there is criminal activity on the platform and that he should be liable for it,” Matze said, noting that Meta-owned competitor WhatsApp has significantly more users.
Matze said the same accusation that Durov used encryption without a license is not only bogus and hypocritical, but also sets a terrifying precedent.
“Saying that cryptography is now illegal is pretty scary because all of these platforms have some sort of cryptography, and in particular, WhatsApp and Facebook products do have end-to-end encryption. So that is pretty frightening,” he said.
Fox News Digital’s Bradford Betz contributed to this report.
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