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What the
Telegram founder’s arrest means for the regulation of social media firms
In this
week’s newsletter: Pavel Durov’s detention by French authorities is a major
break from the norm – but his low-moderation, non-encrypted app is an anomaly
Alex Hern
Tue 27 Aug
2024 12.45 CEST
So we’ve
entered a world in which the CEOs of major social network are arrested and
detained. That’s quite a shift – and it didn’t come in a way anyone was
expecting. From Jennifer Rankin in Brussels:
French
judicial authorities on Sunday extended the detention of the Russian-born
founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, after his arrest at a Paris airport over
alleged offences related to the messaging app.
When this
phase of detention ends, the judge can decide to free him or press charges and
remand in further custody.
French
investigators had issued a warrant for Durov’s arrest as part of an inquiry
into allegations of fraud, drug trafficking, organised crime, promotion of
terrorism and cyberbullying.
Durov – who
holds French citizenship alongside Emirati, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Russian,
the country of his birth – was arrested as he stepped off his private jet after
returning from Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku. On Sunday evening, Telegram issued a
statement:
⚖️ Telegram abides by EU laws,
including the Digital Services Act – its moderation is within industry
standards and constantly improving.
✈️ Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has
nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe.
😵💫 It is absurd to claim that a
platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.
On Monday,
French authorities said that Durov’s arrest was part of an investigation into
cybercrime:
The Paris
prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, said the investigation concerned crimes related to
illicit transactions, child sexual abuse, fraud and the refusal to communicate
information to authorities.
On the face
of it, the arrest seems a sharp break from the norm. Governments have exchanged
strong words with messaging platform providers before, but rarely have there
been arrests. When platform operators do get arrested, as in the cases of Ross
Ulbricht for Silk Road and Kim Dotcom for Megaupload, it tends to be because
authorities can argue that the platform wouldn’t even exist were it not for
crime.
Telegram has
long operated as a low-moderation service, in part because of its roots as a
chat app rather than a social network, in part because of Durov’s own
experience in dealing with the Russian censors, and in part – many have alleged
– because it is simply cheaper to have few moderators and less hands-on control
of your platform.
But even if
a soft-touch moderation team might open a company up to fines under laws like
the UK’s Online Safety Act and the EU’s Digital Services Act, it’s rare for it
to lead to personal charges – and rarer still for those charges to result in an
executive being remanded in custody.
Encryption
But there is
one quirk about Telegram that means it’s in a somewhat different position to
peers such as WhatsApp and Signal: the service is not end-to-end encrypted.
WhatsApp,
Signal and Apple’s iMessage are built from the ground up to prevent anyone
other than the intended recipient from reading content shared on the services.
That includes the companies that run the platforms – as well as any law
enforcement that might request their help.
It’s caused
no end of friction between some of the largest tech companies in the world and
the governments that regulate them but, for the time being, the tech companies
appear to have won the main fight. No one is seriously demanding end-to-end
encryption be outlawed any more, with regulators and critics instead calling
for approaches such as “client-side scanning” to try to police messaging
services another way.
Telegram is
different. The service does offer end-to-end encryption, through a little-used
opt-in feature called “secret chats” but, by default, conversations are
encrypted only insofar as they can’t be read by any random person connected to
your wifi network. To Telegram itself, any messages sent outside a “secret
chat” – which includes every group chat, and every message and comment on one
of the service’s broadcast “channels” – is effectively in the clear.
That product
decision marks Telegram out as distinct from its peers. But, oddly, the
company’s marketing implies the distinction is almost exactly the opposite.
Cryptography expert Matthew Green:
Telegram CEO
Pavel Durov has continued to aggressively market Telegram as a “secure
messenger.” Most recently he issued a scathing criticism of Signal and WhatsApp
on his personal Telegram channel, implying that those systems were backdoored
by the US government, and only Telegram’s independent encryption protocols were
really trustworthy.
It no longer
feels amusing to see the Telegram organization urge people away from
default-encrypted messengers, while refusing to implement essential features
that would widely encrypt their own users’ messages. In fact, it’s starting to
feel a bit malicious.
Can’t v
won’t
The result
of this mismatch between Telegram’s technology and its marketing is an
unfortunate one. The company – and Durov personally – markets its app to people
who are concerned that WhatsApp and even Signal, the gold standard of secure
messengers, aren’t secure enough for their needs, and specifically aren’t
secure enough against the US government.
At the same
time, if a government comes knocking at Telegram’s door asking for information
on a wrongdoer, real or perceived, Telegram doesn’t have the same safety that
its peers do. An end-to-end encrypted service can sincerely tell law
enforcement that it can’t help them. In the long run, that tends to create a
fairly hostile atmosphere, but it also turns the conversation into a general
one about principles of privacy versus policing.
Telegram, by
contrast, has to pick. Either it helps law enforcement, or it ignores them, or
it actively says it won’t cooperate. That’s no different from the options
facing the vast majority of companies online, from Amazon to Zoopla, but only
Telegram’s user base comprises people who want security against law
enforcement.
Every time
Telegram says “yes” to police, it pisses off that user base. Every time it says
“no”, it plays a game of chicken with law enforcement.
The contours
of the disagreement between France and Telegram will inevitably be crushed down
into a conversation about “content moderation”, with supporters clustering
accordingly (Elon Musk has already waded in, tweeting “#FreePavel”). But that
conversation is normally about material posted in public: about what X or
Facebook should or shouldn’t do to manage the discourse on their sites. Private
and group messaging services are a fundamentally different offering, which is
why the end-to-end encrypted mainstream services exist at all. But in trying to
straddle both markets, Telegram may have lost the defences of either.
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