Artyom Seversky/Durov, Telegram and European Bureaucrats

The press release of the French prosecutor's office outlined the charges against Durov, and it is simply a nightmare and a revolution in (anti)legal thought. The need for an organized movement that consistently defends the values of freedom - not only in countries like Russia, but also in the 'civilized' world is becoming ever more urgent.

Durov is charged with serious crimes, which is consistent with the unprecedented nature of the events taking place. He is allegedly an accomplice to fraud, distribution of child pornography, and even drug trafficking. This is because it provided a public platform on which these things were also done in addition to communication. But it can't be like that. According to French criminal law, as well as the general standard that is still in force almost everywhere, you can only be an accomplice intentionally, knowing what you are doing. Durov should have known about all specific crimes, and provided services to specific accounts, knowing what they were doing. How is this possible? We still don't know. Unless Durov really is an evil genius of incredible proportions, it seems the French prosecutor's office is going to build a theory that Durov was informed of specific ongoing crimes. It is likely that such information will be considered to be those same requests for information that Telegram did not fulfill – their failure to fulfill is a separate point of the indictment.

I have already written that what is happening cannot be called ordinary justice, in an ordinary democratic country. Hotel owners and directors are not held responsible as accomplices for drug trafficking in their bars, they are not accused of laundering money from selling cocktails to drug dealers. There are exceptions, but the complicity is usually real, and not the result of a piece of paper from the police saying that they suspect that drugs are being sold here.

In its desire to regulate the Internet, the European bureaucratic class has long since begun to step far beyond the generally accepted limits of law. Durov's case was not the first, but it was a very striking demonstration of the powers that states have ascribed to themselves under the guise and justification of democracy. Civil society simply must side with the accused here and demand from the state real proof of the alleged complicity - proof that Durov did not simply refuse to moderate content, but that he provided services to specific criminals in order to commit crimes, knowing what he was doing. We do not yet have the slightest reason to think that this is so.

Macron has already said that this is not a political matter. It is certainly political — it’s just that the political issue here is much bigger than just Durov. What is being implemented using Durov as an example is precisely a new policy, a policy that seriously revises the fundamental foundations of law. If the French government simply wanted to force Telegram to more strictly moderate, it had many familiar tools — fines, blocking, freezing assets, seeking assistance in interstate cooperation with the UAE. Now we are seeing something different. Criminal prosecution to squeeze the desired corporate practice out of companies is not the behavior of a normal, legal state. This is not about business responsibility, and not about limiting freedom of speech — but about much more fundamental things.

Artyom Seversky 2024-08-26