"... was arrested, apparently over his company's failure to follow content moderation laws "

Be very careful about what you are wishing for.

Ok , Musk first and then who Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg.

I don't particularly care for any of these people but they are providing servicers which I can use quite freely. If any govt or 3LA starts cracking down on what can and cannot be said then we are heading straight for a dictatorship, and no-one wants to live through that.

It's one thing to be ideological but one has to remember that that very ideology will eventually be used against you by those at the top.

If Durov is being held responsable for the actions of Telegrams users, then should God/The Pope be held responsable for the actions of their followers. Should Bill Gates be help responsable for the platform on which Telegram can run, should Linus Torvalds be held responsable for Kali and the possibility that we can hide our actions ?

Be very, very careful, you will get bitten very hard for what you are wishing for. There is no end to the madness to which you aspire, it will only end in a lose/lose situation for all.

Wow... that's quite the ridiculous strawman argument you're presenting there.

But where do you draw the line? Can you hold the owner of a phone company responsible for what someone says in a phone call? The owner of the Post Office for the contents of a letter it carries? What about the situation where the 'owner' of a publicly-traded platform is its shareholders?

It's not necessary to get into the phone company/Post Office argument as this is about groups and channels, not 1:1 chats.

This can be treated just the same way as if Craigslist, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other board/social media of that type refused to cooperate, and that's before we get into Telegram allowing users to create bots which can take payments.

when people have no actual response that's based in reality or reason... they reach for the ridiculous to justify their views.

What makes you think this is not about 1:1 chats?

And what makes a 3-person chat, or a 10-person chat or a 100-person chat different from a 2-person chat?

What makes 20 people discussing something in a church hall they have rented different from 20 people discussing the same thing in an online group?

The vital principle is that the venue providers should not have a requirement to record all the conversations that happen in their church hall, keep the recordings and give them to the police when asked later. Any snooping must be done with a warrant, and be before the chat takes place - not a general requirement to retain everything in case it is useful to the police later.

@Dan 55: regarding telephone companies and content regulation -- "conference calls" are NOT "1:1 channels".

Thats one to one communication. Not groups

More ridiculous strawman arguments...

Also, when ever musk is mentioned in a comment... the downvoters come out in force even if the conversation deviates from anything to do with their god a saviour.

Well, given Durov has French and UAE citizenship (according to the Beeb's coverage of this), it's no wonder that the Russian authorities are not hearing back from the French. And the Russians shouldn't expect to hear back from the French either. Why?

The French are a) holding, and b) treating him as a French citizen, which means there's no recourse to 'consular assistance' or any of that guff. Having citizenship of various countries is nice, but that comes with rights, responsibilities and requirements. And guess what, if you're a French citizen, you can't go running (and there's no evidence of Durov doing this) to your other country of citizenship to beg for help when you get arrested in France, under French laws, especially if you acquired French citizenship post-birth and you were actively (as an adult) required to swear an oath to the Republic.

And the Musketeers fronting and flapping their gums about freedom of speech and the like should sit TF down and shut up if they are a) not French, b) don't know French law, and c) don't know citizenship rights and responsibilities. And it's clear none of them fulfil those requirements either.

Yay

Its taken a while but the politicos have finally woken up and become streetwise

Is it absurd to expect the owner to make an effort to prevent abuse?

And "we can't afford it" isn't an excuse.

Indeed its not unreasonable. But this must be applied across all platforms, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Although breaking encryption and inspecting messages is unreasonable.

The proposed wheeze of not breaking encryption, but using AI (simple pattern matching) on the end device to inspect messages is not reasonable either.

So whats reasonable?

this must be applied across all platforms, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

not only that, but also postal services and commercial airlines must be shut down because terrorists and drug traffickers are using those. Heck, ALL society should be shut down and people subjected to house restrictions, unless they can positively PROVE that they're law-abiding citizens. Everybody should be treated as guilty until proven innocent. And even then, only for some limited time and localization. Couldn't some computer specialists come up with some sort or portable visual code for that could serve that purpose ?

Good of you to directly going for the extreme...

"So whats reasonable?"

There is NO reasonable way to protect user privacy AND monitor abuse. Police forces and 'intelligence' agencies need to cure themselves of their data addiction and get back to the basics - using old-fashioned detective work to identify and go after the endpoints.

As to what constitutes 'abusive material', or even 'fake news' - We all know it starts out with "think of the children" and "everyone is against this" issues like terrorism and child porn. We also know, because it is literally happening right now, that this is rapidly expanded to whatever targets the government decides, and 'fake news' can be whatever the current government or media establishments decree it to be, even if it's debatable or actually true.

As I understand it, Telegram has end to end encryption, so they literally cannot control what's written in messages — by design.

Now countries might well decide to make end to end encryption illegal, but until that's the case, it seems weird to complain about a lack of moderation on such a platform.

It is also a bit unusual to straight up arrest the CEO, but I suppose Telegram does not have a presence in France that they can serve with legal complaints?

This is not about encryption. Telegram only has end to end encryption for what they call "secret chats" and these are (by design?) buried in the UI. Groups, channels, and non-secret chats are all effectively non-encrypted at rest on Telegram's servers.

Telegram is not an E2E chat app like WhatsApp or Signal, it's a social network like Facebook or Reddit which also allows you to open an E2E chat window if you want to.

France detained him for Telegram's lack of action over groups and channels where all kind of fraud and trading of illegal goods is allowed to happen and payment for them is taken by bots. It's the dark web in a nice-looking app.

This is not an attack on free speech, it's an attack on an app which facilitates crime. I'm perfectly happy with that.

Huh, if crims are using non-encrypted Telegram chats which law enforcement are aware if surely its simple to infiltrate, track and arrest crims? Shutting it down takes that opportunity away.

Wasn't WhatsApp groups used to organise UK riots recently? Thus an app that facilitates crime?

Is it really that easy to track and arrest someone anywhere in the world who sells stolen ID, bank account, or card data via a bot that takes bitcoin?

How easy do you think it is to go after [1]someone in Nigeria using Telegram to facilitate sextortion ?

It was [2]Telegram and [3]X that were used to organise far-right riots in the UK.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/22/video-sextortion-guides-and-manuals-found-on-tiktok-and-youtube

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/07/why-telegram-is-the-go-to-app-for-those-wanting-to-spread-toxic-information

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/08/chester-woman-55-arrested-over-false-posts-about-southport-murders

"It was Telegram and X that were used to organise far-right riots in the UK."

And we're now seeing some of those dozy enough to use those being brought to trial.

"Is it absurd to expect the owner to make an effort to prevent abuse?"

It IS absurd to expect that a platform that facilitates users' end-to-end encrypted communication has the slightest notion of what's in the communication. Governments making that expectation are implicitly saying that any company providing end-to-end encrypted communication is illegal.

This is not about end-to-end encryption. If you do think it's about end-to-end encryption then it's because Telegram has worked to bring about that widespread misunderstanding for years.

End-to-end encryption is one small part of Telegram and even then it's only available on the mobile client, not on the desktop client.

And you are missing the point. This is about chat groups. Not one to one communication

It's France - if you piss off or come onto the radar of the French State it's not going to be pleasant.

Liberte, Egalitie and Fraternite go out the window when you upset the elegantly tailored mandarins at the Elysee Palace

"Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others : thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights. These bounds may be determined only by Law."

Liberty isn't the right to do whatever you want.

One has to ask why did this not happen during the banking crisis ?

Oh yea anyone in the government with a really large bank account was fearful of loosing it all, so .... no arrests before, during or after.

One has to ask why did this not happen during the banking crisis ?

because the banks are running the – western (NATO) – governments

Sure buddy, sure.

Iceland jailed 36 bankers. The USA jailed two that I'm aware of: Allen Stanford and Bernie Madoff.

The only way to combat the rise of extremism, hate and bile on social media is to make them liable for it... I've been suggesting for a few years now that they be reclassified as 'publishers' to make them liable for the content they allow and profit from on their platforms... I was suggesting mandatory minimum fines... say 1000 per view and 5000 per share. The idea being to make it so unprofitable, that they have no choice but to work to eradicate it or see their revenues collapse into such a negative that the company cannot survive and no VC is going to want to piss their money away paying fines.

I know that's probably never going to happen... But I can hope.

So treating the spread of hate and bile and as I've seen reported CSAM on the platform as the crimes that they are... and holding the owners of the company liable... yeah. I'm kinda for that.

Fines would have been great... jail time for those allowing and profiting from it... even better.

Also... Russia is only getting involved because they use it to organise and communicate with their own forces.. or at least, some of their own forces use it to communicate with each other.

By definition if anyone can see illegal content they are party to the chat or group, and therefore can identify at least by a phone number the author / poster of the illegal content. So the trivial answer is "report the info to the police".

It's been repeated ad nauseam on these pages - there is no technical way for encrypting that allows only specific parties (aka 'good guys') to decrypt without anyone else being able to. And even if there WERE such a technical possibility, we have only the 'good guys' own word that the power isn't abused (an assurance that isn't worth shit let alone printer paper).

Either we are willing to accept that there will be some level of criminal behaviour / content on comms networks while the rest of the world goes about it's business, or we criminalise every comms user and middleman to have the theoretical on-paper possibility of catching all criminals (which will never come to effect in real life). In a free liberal society, only the first option is any option at all.

By definition if anyone can see illegal content they are party to the chat or group, and therefore can identify at least by a phone number the author / poster of the illegal content. So the trivial answer is "report the info to the police".

And the police issue take-down requests but Telegram do not co-operate.

It's been repeated ad nauseam on these pages - there is no technical way for encrypting that allows only specific parties (aka 'good guys') to decrypt without anyone else being able to. And even if there WERE such a technical possibility, we have only the 'good guys' own word that the power isn't abused (an assurance that isn't worth shit let alone printer paper).

The encrypted text and the key for everything except "secret chats" are stored on Telegram's servers, which is effectively the same as Telegram storing them as plaintext. All groups, channels, and "cloud chats" [1]fail the "mud puddle" test .

[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/04/05/icloud-who-holds-key/

> And the police issue take-down requests but

> Telegram do not co-operate.

And all the other platforms (that allow group chats, or similar) co-operate?

Some do... some *did*, until their ownership changed.

"And the police issue take-down requests"

A more positive action would be, on being presented with evidence of crime, including conspiracy, to investigate, arrest and charge those committing it. Issuing a takedown notice, even if it's acted on, does not bring those responsible to book; it doesn't even deter them.

The comparison with phone calls is odd. The issue is not what is sent in real time, like a phone call. It is with the stored record left on the server, like on a noticeboard.