Telegram’s Pavel Durov is a poor poster boy for free speech

The tech moguls have a partial point: It is, admittedly, a disturbing precedent for a democracy such as France to arrest a chief executive in a dispute over content moderation, even if Durov was not exactly sent to Devil’s Island. On Wednesday, he was released on bail of about $5.6 million and indicted on charges related to allowing child sexual abuse material, fraud and drug trafficking on his platform while refusing to cooperate with law enforcement. (Telegram claims to abide by European Union laws and insists, “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”)

“Countries should be able to enforce content moderation,” my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Adam Segal, a cybersecurity expert, told me. “But arresting the CEO sets a really bad precedent, especially for more illiberal states.”

That’s true. But it’s also true that Durov makes a poor poster boy for freedom of speech. His platform exemplifies power without responsibility. Telegram claims nearly 1 billion users around the world but does next to no content moderation and refuses to cooperate with law enforcement investigations. Its entire staff reportedly numbers just 50 or so people. By contrast, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, employs around 40,000 people on its safety and security teams alone.

As Stanford University’s Internet Observatory has documented, Telegram does not even police some of the vilest content on the internet — “child sex abuse material,” or CSAM. A report from the Internet Observatory concluded: “Telegram implicitly allows the trading of CSAM in private channels.”

What this means in practice was described by my Post colleagues in a disturbing article that should be required reading for Durov’s defenders: Adults who prey on children use Telegram, they wrote in March, to “post child pornography, videos of corpse desecration and images of the cuts they have made children inflict on themselves … . In chat groups with as many as 5,000 members, they brag about their abusive acts and goad each other on. They share tips on where to find girls with eating disorders and other vulnerabilities congregating online, and on how to manipulate them.”

Telegram is of importance as well to the brutal Russian war effort in Ukraine — Russian troops use it to communicate with one another, and it provides a platform for pro-war bloggers to spread their propaganda. (Ukrainians also use Telegram, but to a lesser degree.) That explains why Russian officials and commentators have been having a meltdown over Durov’s arrest, even though the Telegram CEO, who is now a citizen of France and the United Arab Emirates, has had his own disputes with Vladimir Putin. “They practically detained the head of communication of the Russian army,” a Russian military blogger complained on — where else? — Telegram.

In sum, as Alex Stamos — the former director of the Internet Observatory who is now at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne — told me regarding Telegram: “They are truly bad actors.” That doesn’t mean that Durov necessarily deserves to be in prison, but it does mean that Telegram and other social media platforms need to take content moderation much more seriously. Ideally, these companies would have responsible owners who would understand the need to balance free speech (and profits) with public safety, but, as Durov shows, many of these social media giants are taking an absolutist approach that puts society at risk — with Telegram being the most irresponsible.

X is doing more than Telegram to stop child abuse materials, Stamos told me, but it has given up trying to stop disinformation designed to influence elections or even to foment violence. Just a few weeks ago, Britain was dealing with anti-immigrant rioting after right-wing social media users falsely claimed that the perpetrator of a horrific attack that killed three girls was a Muslim immigrant. Far from trying to quell the toxic misinformation on X, Musk amplified it, tweeting that “civil war is inevitable” and echoing unfounded right-wing claims that Prime Minister Keir Starmer was tougher on right-wing rioters than minority groups.

While the United States, like most countries around the world, actively polices child sex material online, there is much less that the U.S. government can do about online disinformation, even when its being spread by foreign countries to manipulate U.S. elections. Internet companies are protected not only by the First Amendment but also by the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which exempts internet platforms of most liability for content posted by their users.

European countries have more robust regulations, such as the British Online Safety Act and the European Union’s Digital Services Act. The goal, as the European Commission writes, is “to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation.” If the E.U. is successful, it may have an impact on what U.S. users see, because large social media companies can be fined up to 6 percent of their global revenue for noncompliance.

The problem, Stamos told me, is that these regulations are testing the ability of European bureaucrats to implement them. Mercifully, the E.U. isn’t a dictatorship like China, where authorities clamp down on everything on the internet, from political dissent to child pornography. In democratic countries, regulators have to weigh free speech in the balance — and one person’s disinformation is another person’s bold truth-telling. “Coming up with enforceable minimums is tough,” Stamos said. “The E.U. is pushing in this area, but it’s slow going. It’s actually spectacularly difficult.”

Let’s hope Europe can get it right. The West desperately needs a model of social media regulation that allows robust debate while limiting criminal activity and disinformation, and the E.U. could show the way. But we haven’t gotten there yet, which is presumably why French authorities have sidelined the E.U. and resorted to arresting Telegram’s CEO. That’s troubling — but so is all the vile and dangerous content that Telegram allows online.