On August 24, 2024, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov flew to the outskirts of Paris on his private jet on what can be considered a typical Saturday. His normal day was disrupted by an abrupt arrest by French authorities the moment he landed. This arrest sent shockwaves across right-wing media and their followers around the world.
Telegram as a social networking platform can be best described as complicated. Its lack of regulation and censorship represents the internets (and more specifically the West’s) ideal of free speech. It features an extensive system of encryption, which helps to protect the users private/chat information. With many praising it for enabling freedom of speech, it is also a double-edged sword, serving as a breeding ground for many unscrupulous users of the dark web, including hate speech and criminal activity. Such activity includes the likes of sex trafficking along with explicit drug trading and selling. Yet, Telegram wasn’t only a bastion of the dark web but also a preferred platform of members within the far right, where people are free to speak on their political beliefs away from what they considered the “mainstream.” As such, with the shocking arrest of Durov, many of those on the far right considered this to be an attack on their ideals and pushed it to be the narrative of the state destroying their identity and freedoms. Though Telegram has been banned from countries due to external political reasons, it is still significantly used across the world.
This raises the age-old question that many state leaders and governments must face: when is free speech truly “free,” and to what extent can it grow without harming society? Governments can pursue policies similar to those of the People’s Republic of China, where all information and activity on the internet is tightly regulated, ensuring that any dissident or entities the state deems “harmful” is taken care of swiftly. Alternatively, countries can be like Estonia, where everything is online in this day and age and contains some of the strongest privacy laws in the world. In determining what can be allowed to be said, countries must strike a balance to refrain from diminishing its peoples rights and ensure the security of citizens through law enforcement. We have all observed how far right rhetoric online can lead to destructive dissent in the United States: most notably through Charlottesville in 2017 and the capitol attack on January 6, 2021. In the age of Q-anon, Donald Trump, far right conspiracy theorists, and “online warriors,” the interactions that people have online are of significant importance and cannot be understated. France created a cybercrime law in 2023, and the arrest of Pavel Durov was justified through that law (yet it was untested because it was so new). But there are those who believe that it is due to national security reasons, as Telegram is extensively used by the Russian military and its related groups.
As such, I want to claim that free speech is not dead for the far right. As much as Telegram members lament the loss of what they believe to be a free platform, it is important to understand that it will only be replaced with another. The internet is unregulated in a certain sense, and unless the U.S. decides to make their version of China’s “Great Fire-Wall,” free speech in the most basic essence will still exist. The argument should instead be focused on why people use the internet to promote hate speech and other problematic activities, which has only increased since the advent of the pandemic.
