You’d think Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was a Kremlin hacker or an international extremist, not the creator of a well-known social media app with almost a billion users, if you read the business media coverage of his arrest in Paris this week.
The claims against Durov— whom the media always fail to tell us was  , born in Russia — include” involvement in the distribution of child pornography and marketing of drugs, money laundering, and a refusal to collaborate with law protection” , , according to The New York Times. Almost every news outlet made a similar claim, saying Durov is” implicated” in major crimes like child pornography, giving the impression that Durov is apparently involved in wicked criminal enterprises, or that Telegram itself is a legal enterprise.
In reality, Telegram and Durov are being investigated in France because the social media app maintains a more strict commitment to free speech than most of its rivals ( with the exception of X under Elon Musk, who has publicly criticized Durov’s arrest as an insult to free speech ).  ,
In other words, what we’re seeing is the state criminalizing free speech in France, in this case Emmanuel Macron’s France, under the pretense that lightly moderating content on major social media platforms, like Telegram does, amounts to complicity in whatever the app’s users say or do. This is nonsense of course. Nobody, not even the French president, would hold Mark Zuckerberg accountable for everything that Facebook or Instagram users post. In particular, the intention behind targeting Durov is to put Telegram under the control of the state, allowing it to be used as a tool of propaganda and social control.
We see this across the West. Formerly liberal democracies are now effectively governed by regimes that are becoming more and more open to free speech and freedom of conscience. In Britain, police went door to door to apprehend and jail people who allegedly posted unfavorable sentiments and memes on social media during the recent riots. Every day, it seems as though we learn more about how the federal government compels social media companies to do their bidding.
In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted to Congress this week that Facebook assisted in the implementation of a censorship regime designed to thwart the right of Americans to free speech in 2020 as a result of the Covid pandemic and in the run-up to the presidential election. From the Twitter Files, we already knew that this was happening, but Zuckerberg’s letter confirms how widespread and widespread the federal censorship effort was.
The fact that this could occur in America, which, in contrast to France and Britain, has a First Amendment intended to shield citizens from censorship and viewpoint discrimination, is an indication of how illiberal the West has become. The First Amendment is a dead letter in America if the White House and the executive branch can coerce private citizens into censoring their political speech.
At this point, nothing is actually disputable. You would have to be dishonest or in willful denial to argue that this is n’t happening because it is so obvious. The question is: why? What changed so much that free speech is now seen in the West as a serious threat to the social order, even to the preservation of democracy?  ,
The short answer is that administrative bureaucracies have taken control of once-liberal democracies, or what Curtis Yarvin has referred to as an institutional oligarchy, which views free speech as a serious threat to its rule. This bureaucracy, or what we might call the administrative or deep state, is completely unaccountable to the people it seeks to control and treats them as cogs to manage rather than citizens from whom they derive their just powers. In fact, the prospect of accountability is what directly affects the bureaucratic regime against the populace, and they see them as a real threat to its rule.
The most important thing to understand about this institutional oligarchy is that you ca n’t vote it out of power. The people in charge of the regime have no authority to be removed from office. Relying on electoral politics to overthrow the regime will only get you so far because the bureaucracy exists above and beyond electoral politics as they are typically understood. Consider Brexit, or, closer to home, what the executive branch agencies did to the Trump administration. The federal bureaucracy’s machinery immediately launched a war against Trump, hamstringing his administration from day one, regardless of whether the American people voted him into office.
A more recent example will suffice to demonstrate what I mean. Macron has sparked a political crisis in France by refusing to appoint a prime minister from the coalition that won the most parliamentary seats in the snap election last month, where Durov has been detained but is not yet officially charged with a crime.
Following the results of France’s right-wing National Rally party’s election to the European Parliament, Macron demanded a snap election. The results of the snap election left France’s National Assembly divided into three roughly equal blocks: left, center, and right. An ad-hoc coalition of every left-of-center party, led by the New Popular Front, won the most seats in the assembly and therefore has the right to form a new government. ( This left-wing alliance, it should be noted, formed solely for the purpose of thwarting the right-wing National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, which it barely managed to do. )
In a fairly straightforward soft coup, Macron and his allies are refusing to hand over power to the losers of the election. Despite losing national elections, Macron’s party is still in power. The only reason the French president has given so far is that, in his view, appointing a prime minister from the New Popular Front would lead to an immediate no-confidence vote, the collapse the new government, and the “weakening” of the country.
Understand what this means: across the West, the people are not really in charge. And why should the state permit the people to post whatever they want on social media if they are not in charge? Why should they be given the right to free speech?
In fact, allowing the people to say whatever they want poses a significant threat to the regime if they are not in charge. The truth of the situation might emerge if free speech is allowed to flourish. The people might be aware of the fact that the democratic process has been taken over by an unjust bureaucracy. Social media apps like Telegram and X must also be put under the control of the government. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in , his recent speech endorsing former President Donald Trump, “governments and oppressors do n’t censor lies, they do n’t fear lies. They fear the truth, and that’s what they censor”.
