Not Just A Platform: Are Tech Tycoons Facing the Music?
Not Just A Platform: Are Tech Tycoons Facing the Music?
After a Brazilian court orders a suspension of X, and the arrest of Telegram's Pavel Durov, Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on how global pressures on tech titans may signal a moment to press 'reset'.
The year is 2024, and humanity is sick. Billionaires who own social media platforms have encouraged a steady drip of high-level toxins into the minds of their users. Hiding behind the antiquated political cloak of ‘libertarianism’, these shadily funded tech tycoons are generals in an information war marching the world toward authoritarianism.
It’s no coincidence that their rise to absolute power occurred in the same era as the global decline of democratic rule.
In the West, we have given hostile nations who fund these platforms steady access to the minds of our citizens. They’ve created foot soldiers of our young men, many radicalized away from decency and empathy and into the arms of “influencers” like Andrew Tate, who was just arrested again for trafficking minors and sex with a minor.
And with every new violent massacre at the hands of another digitally radicalized user, the tech tycoons scream ‘free speech’ as if that absolves them of any blood on their hands.
But with the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in Paris last Saturday the cult of the genius tech bro may be losing some of its absolute power. The arrest of the Russian-born billionaire is a reminder that Telegram is not just a platform, but according to the indictment, has been used for trafficking such crimes such as child sexual assault material, money laundering, arms and drug trafficking, fraud, and failing to cooperate with law enforcement.
Hazardous to Global Health
Also the founder of the Russian propaganda outlet Vkontakte, Durov said he’s fathered 100 children, and although he’s been painted as a folk hero who fled Russia rather than turn over user data, his dozens of trips back to his home country suggest maskirovka, the Russian art of concealment and disguise.
Durov, now a French-Emirati citizen who was released on five million dollars bail and barred from leaving France, maintains he has ‘nothing to hide’ but French authorities charged him on Wednesday with complicity in running a digital platform enabling criminal transactions. If convicted, Durov could face up to ten years in prison.
Vienna-based Disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler told Byline Supplement that Telegram has been increasingly hazardous to global health.
“Telegram has played a significant role in supporting anti-government opposition within authoritarian regimes, such as in Belarus four years ago, while simultaneously becoming one of the main distribution channels for propaganda and disinformation from these same regimes and extremist actors, including conspiracy theorists and even terrorist groups,” said Pichler.
He pointed to former Russian puppet president Dmitry Medvedev’s channel as just one example.
“On his Telegram channel, he advocates for Russia to support Kremlin-friendly parties on both the right and the left, posts maps that depict all of Ukraine as part of Russia, and has called the Olympic Games in France ‘disgusting’ and a ‘disgrace’,” said Pichler, who also noted that Russian propagandists on Telegram have already started painting Durov as an “Assange-like figure”.
He added that “pro-Russian Telegram channels function as a kind of ‘press agency,’ providing fabricated content to ‘alternative media’ and anti-Western outlets worldwide”.
But for decades, tech executives have skated, and part of this lack of accountability and personal liability for their products is that laws and regulations have not moved at the speed of technology.
In addition, whenever the crimes committed on these platforms have made front page news, a chorus of billionaires, digital influencers and sketchy journalists sound the “free speech” prebuttal.
Among the loudest: Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson, and even such pro-Kremlin politicians as Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia congressperson who rode the QAnon Cult to power.
“France Doesn’t Fuck Around”
The subject of the podcast American Psyop Wes Clark Jr told Byline Supplement: “It’s worth noting which online influencers and journalists rush to Durov's defense because Kremlin mouthpieces and useful idiots from across the ideological spectrum will be put to work trying to convince you that these criminals have done nothing wrong,”
But he says this arrest is a “very big deal”.
“If I were a billionaire owner of a large social media company used as a channel to commit crimes internationally, I'd probably be squawking about free speech and avoiding travel to Paris right now. France doesn't fuck around.”
Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in a statement that Durov is required to check in at a police station twice a week.
Along with the French charges, the EU is also investigating Telegram. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), Telegram was supposed to provide updated monthly user numbers but did not, and failure to turn over accurate new data puts Telegram in breach of the DSA.
The EU’s tech regulations, combined with the French arresting Durov, both signal that tech bros may be finally facing the music.
As we reported in the third article in our Unmusked series, the European Commission has already opened an investigation into X.
The Commission is concerned about Russia influencing elections this year through X, with Musk accused of transmitting messages for Putin. And since the passing of sweeping online content legislation, the EU can take on tech honchos in a way they couldn’t in the past.
Recently, European Commissioner Thierry Breton posted on X/Twitter an official letter sent to Musk, cc-ing Linda Yaccarino, where he puts Musk on notice.
“There is a risk of amplification of potentially harmful content in Europe in connection with events with major audience [sic] around the world,” Breton writes, tagging Musk. Breton, who is Europe’s top digital enforcer, cites the Digital Services Act and warns Musk about the spreading of “harmful content”.
Brazil is going even further. On Friday, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered the "immediate suspension" of X in Brazil, after a court-imposed deadline expired for the company to identify a legal representative in Brazil and pay $3.8 million in fines.
According to Reuters, “The move is the latest chapter in an ongoing feud between Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and Elon Musk, which also included the freezing of the satellite internet provider Starlink's financial accounts in Brazil.”
Musk was given 24 hours to comply, and his failure to respond, meant that X was shut down in Brazil on Saturday.
It does not appear the tech bros can meme their way out of the increasingly sharp global moves to hold them account.
The Tech Arms Race Between X and Telegram
The tech arms race has been compared to the nuclear arms race and in many ways, it’s been more destructive. While we live under the cloud of nuclear blackmail, the actual digital harms to humanity are ongoing.
“Telegram is the weapon delivery system that hides its purpose by maintaining a veneer of usefulness as a messaging platform,” Silicon Valley technologist High Fidelity told Byline Supplement. “Dismantling the weapons’ delivery systems is the first step in overcoming our adversary in psychological warfare.”
High Fidelity and extremist researcher and reporter Jim Stewartson are my podcast partners on RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation, where we’ve been sounding the alarm for three years on how social media platforms are utilized as launching pads for weapons of mass destruction in hybrid warfare.
Among the first steps to stop further destruction: international cooperation on addressing the severity of the social media problem. And as Stewartson said, let’s begin with busting the tech bro myths.
“Durov claims to be fleeing the Russian Government, but that’s a lie,” Stewartson told Byline Supplement. “He did a deal with the Russian government, which gave them access to his platform. Telegram was just kind of a weirdish international version of Twitter, until a very important moment, and that moment was January 8 2021. That was when Facebook and Twitter simultaneously got rid of all of QAnon after the J6 Insurrection.”
QAnon is a conspiracy cult that accuses Democrats of ritual crimes against children and offers up Putin and Trump as saviors. The majority of foot soldiers of the J6 attack on the US Capitol were the true believers of this cult. Stewartson said that the QAnon community became virtually homeless.
“The entire QAnon community said, ‘Where are we gonna go’? And Telegram was what was left,” he said.
“So QAnon people traveled right into a pit of Nazis and foreign intelligence services. Millions of people flooded into Telegram — no censorship, no moderators — a platform that let them do their most extreme rhetoric. I have 600 Telegram channels [a broadcasting tool], and I can literally type into my channels and understand almost immediately what the Russian government is up to, first of all, and how those narratives are being spread across the entire international landscape. So in America, Telegram is just a cult indoctrination system.”
He said the system’s life blood is sociopathy.
“It is the erasure of not only logic and rationality, but critically, of empathy,” Stewartson said. “There is no caring about human beings anywhere, and it should be burnt in a fire. I know that there are people who use it internationally, and I'm not saying everybody on Telegram is terrible, but right now in America, arguably even more than Fox News, Telegram is the most potent propaganda and mental destruction engine on the planet.”
Stewartson added that Musk’s invitation to re-platform formerly banned accounts run by neo-Nazis on X/Twitter, was in part to compete with Telegram, which launched in 2013 as a cloud-based instance messaging app.
“Telegram is where you could find people like Nick Fuentes and genocidal maniacs who want to murder whole swaths of humanity,” he said. “So Musk let them back onto his machine to basically recreate Telegram, which is basically a recreation of a ‘chan’. But here’s the good news: we’ve reached a point where we just don’t want it. It’s like, weird. And people are calling it out.”
Another excellent side effect of that magical battering ram of tagging right-wing extremists with the term ‘weird’ is that it’s helped level some of that sociopathy. As I wrote in Mojo Rising, the recent Democratic National Convention offered a return to normalcy.
The normalcy of it all was such an antidote to the toxic levels of fear-baiting propaganda from the right-wing in the US — that constant drip drip drip of something awful being replaced by something that actually feels good for a change.
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
That inside joke for tech support is a metaphor for what the world needs now: a healthy reset.
Back in the more benign early days of the internet, the US gave social media companies a pass with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which turned tech titans into untouchables.
“Selling drugs, trading in guns and ammunition, human trafficking, planning terrorist attacks, overthrowing governments, sparking genocides, promoting open lies and naked defamation. All good. No problem,” wrote Thom Hartmann, the author of The Hidden History of Big Brother: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy. “It’s time to return to rational regulation of social media and that begins with gutting or ending Section 230.”
“Tech billionaires are at war with us,” High Fidelity told Byline Supplement. “Their companies need to be put under responsible new ownership, and the former owners need to be prosecuted for conspiring with foreign governments to interfere in world elections and for enabling criminal acts.”
And there’s some kind of poetic justice that in this new kind of war, the Great Information War, France has made the biggest battle move so far.
At the Byline Festival in July, I met a man from France who told me the reason there are so many young men radicalized toward the extreme right in France is because the country does a poor job of teaching the history of World War II.
He said, “It’s our national shame.”
Well, just maybe, France is making up for its government’s role in World War II, how it surrendered to Germany on June 22, 1940, a week after the German army captured Paris unopposed.
By arresting a tech billionaire, the French government has taken a lead in responding to the attacks by foreign adversaries on the West.
Vive la France.
Vive la Resistance!