What Pavel Durov blatantly did wrong

Pavel Durov, founder of VK and Telegram and CEO of the messaging platform, was arrested in Paris, as you have surely heard from any news source, including online.

The news caused a stir because of the manner of the arrest: Durov was unaware that he was the subject of an arrest warrant, despite being a French citizen, as well as a Russian citizen and a citizen of a Caribbean island. Apparently, the warrant was issued only minutes before he landed.

Making the allegation that Durov has not monitored pedophile content on his platform is likened to saying that a smartphone manufacturer’s phone is being utilized by criminals. Russia had not arrested him either, after it turned out that Telegram had been used to organize the Crocus bombing. Pavel Durov is also the one who, when he was administrator of VK, refused to have the messages of Putin’s opponents intercepted.

Instead, France resorted to a ruse in order to arrest him, which is so much for the rule of law. By now, we know how regulations have been maneuvered to restrict freedoms to the unthinkable between European arrest warrants and DSA, a directive to suppress freedom of expression.
Unfortunately, Durov has made some glaring mistakes:

• First, he has been perfectly transparent, keeping the administration of the mesage system in his own name. Instead of leaving the CEO post to a quiet blockhead who would not move from Dubai, he wanted to be transparent and hold the post directly. In this way, it is easy to hold him accountable.
• He evidently did not allow French intelligence services access to his messaging system. Otherwise, we should also see the Meta Responsabilid, who run WhatsApp, arrested. Evidently, he did not allow the privacy of channel operators to be sufficiently violated.
• He did not want to make a fully decentralized system on blockchain but kept the most efficient and secure solution, but that did not allow him to discharge the responsibility completely to the users. In short, he worked too well without thinking that, in doing so, he was exposing himself to the countries he considered safe.
• He created an independent advertising system, totally untied from the big groups that are in charge of advertising and monopolize it, and, by the way, based on an internal cryptocurrency, TON, which facilitates internal advertising exchange. We know how, in the U.S., advertising has been used to influence social media. It took Elon Musk to file a lawsuit against the complex that wants to control communication through advertising. Durov evidently annoyed.

In 2023, a major investigation implicated Instagram because it favored pedophiles. No one arrested Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO. Evidently, if they arrested Durov, there would be quite different reasons. Durov was too honest and had too much faith in institutions. Hopefully, he will come out of this situation soon and learn from what happened.

–