Earlier this month, French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, a chat app widely used around the world by nearly 1 billion people, including by political dissidents and terrorist groups. Some of the criminal charges, which are peculiar to French law, stem from allegations of clearly illegal and harmful material spread on the platform. But other charges, which relate to the mere use of encrypted technology, have set off wider concerns about a crackdown on free speech. To some extent, this has been led by the right, with Elon Musk pushing #freepavel on his X platform. But these worries have also been shared by journalists and civil-liberties groups worried about the encroachment of law enforcement on the way that people around the world communicate.,
To get a clearer sense of what is going on, I spoke with Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. Keller, who was previously an associate general counsel for Google on free-expression issues, has written that the charges are more likely to be focused on how illegal material is handled by big tech but could represent a broader threat to how we people communicate online.
Hellbound and Down 