Why We Should All Care About Saturday's Arrest of Telegram Founder Pavel Durov

Pavel Durov, founder of the encrypted private messaging app Telegram, was arrested and thrown in jail by French officials at le Bourget Airport near Paris Saturday. Durov was arrested for his refusal to cooperate with French, UK, German, and EU officials to censor the entirely private speech that takes place on his platform.

X owner Elon Musk was so struck by the development that he re-tweeted a post about it:

Over the past year, I have frequently written and commented about the dire situation our society would be in today were it not for the fact that Musk chose to defend the first amendment by vastly over-paying for Twitter, now X. When Musk completed that transaction, our country was right on the verge of falling completely under the same sort of brutish censorship regime that increasingly controls thought and speech across Europe and other unfortunate countries like Brazil.

The governments in those countries are able to increasingly crack down on freedom of speech and thought through the eager cooperation of other big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and most others.