Reaction to France’s arrest this weekend of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has, no surprise, broken along mostly predictable lines — with one side, for example, arguing that France took the billionaire into custody in response to widespread criminality that was enabled via his encrypted messaging app. Meanwhile, free speech advocates on the other side like Edward Snowden and Alexei Navalny advisor Leonid Volkov have blasted France’s move as an attempt to enjoy some measure of control over a digital bastion of free speech, given that Durov’s app exerts minimal oversight over its 900 million users worldwide.
I will not attempt an analysis of the wisdom of either of those points of view here, because I do, in fact, understand where both sides are coming from.
Certainly, free speech is a core American ideal, and I will forever and always regard with deep suspicion anyone whose dismissiveness about that ideal causes them to say obviously deranged things like free speech is mostly “an obsession” of white men today (in the words of ex-Twitter VP Jason Goldman, which were shared in Time magazine).
Something else worth pointing out, specifically for American readers: Most people like to describe the First Amendment as “granting” Americans freedom of speech, whereas a strict reading of the amendment’s language actually leads one to a different conclusion. The only thing the amendment says about free speech is that Congress can’t make any laws that “abridge,” or get in the way, of it. I may be nitpicking here, but in keeping with the idea that rights don’t come from governments, the First Amendment didn’t create the freedom of speech; it simply promises that the government will stay out of your way when it comes to that particular freedom.
Having said that…
There is not a single right I enjoy as an American that’s limitless and can’t be properly taken away. The Constitution guarantees me the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but if I decided to go and commit a crime — well, say goodbye to all that life, liberty, and happiness that I previously enjoyed. Likewise, the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms does not, for example, confer upon you the right to own a nuclear weapon. It, too, has implied limits. Long story short, there’s no “you’re not the boss of me” defense that enables unfettered liberty.
I don’t think I’m making a complicated or controversial argument here. Free speech, for example, is not a hall pass to incite violence. And anyone cloaking themselves in the mantle of free speech in order to promote or engage in crime of any kind is obviously an odious human being who deserves to be punished.
So where am I going with all this?
Given that it’s increasingly popular to equate free speech with the far-right, I can’t help but feel like what France did to Telegram’s CEO, some country is going to do to Elon Musk next.
The problem here, as I see it, is that people are erroneously conflating a bunch of things that exist separately. Free speech, the ideal version of it, is not compatible with a Borg-like surveillance machine that’s always on the hunt for individuals doing or saying specific things. For the same reason that free countries are not authoritarian police states. In free spaces of any kind, there will always be good people and the worst kinds of people benefitting, together, from the same freedoms.
Why does freedom of speech even need to exist at all? It’s to prevent someone from being able to shove their belief down your throat, or to punish you for a belief or opinion of your own. My personal belief is that you ought to use your own freedom of speech to fight back when Elon says something provocative, shocking, or harmful. And that throwing the owners of online platforms into jail because they’re not heavy-handed enough with their users — that’s what the actual bad guys like Russia, North Korea, and China try to do.
How ironic that Durov’s arrest wasn’t at the hands of Russia, which tried unsuccessfully to get Telegram to crack down on its users who expressed certain opinions. But, rather, it was a democratic nation built on Western ideas about liberty and freedom that ultimately did the deed. Let that sink in.
