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In the last two weeks, two major blows were cast in the battle over online information: The first by France; the second by Brazil. While the two countries are thousands of miles apart, they belong to the same trend: Of governments seeking to moderate the flow of content online.
Today, we investigate the first – the attack on Telegram – and next week, we’ll investigate the second.
On August 24, Pavel Durov’s private jet landed in France. Life for the billionaire was good: The 39-year-old – the 120th-richest person on Earth – had just flown in from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Paris.
Less than a month prior, Durov had disclosed that he had fathered over 100 kids. As self-declared “high quality donor material,” he said it was his “civic duty to donate more sperm to anonymously help more couples.”
But moments after his jet landed on August 24, the police swarmed, throwing his future into doubt.
18 years prior, in 2006, Durov was a university student in St. Petersburg when a friend showed him Facebook. The duo thought up a Russian equivalent and launched it that September. Within ten months, the site – VKontakte, literally “In Contact” – had one million users; a year later, it had ten million. By 2009, it was Russia’s most popular social platform with a multi-billion dollar valuation.
VKontakte became a hub of anti-Putin opposition. Then in 2011 – just as Facebook was fueling the Arab Spring revolutions – opposition pages on the platform began calling out rigging in Russia’s parliamentary vote. Durov received a message from Russia’s government: Ban the opposition pages.
At the time, a message leaked between Durov and an ally of Alexei Navalny, the recently killed Russian opposition leader.
“Over the past few days, the [Russian security service] has been asking us to block opposition groups, including yours,” Durov wrote. He said he would refuse the order and Tweeted out a meme mocking the Russian authorities.
“We don’t do this on principle,” he wrote. “Vkontakte is a 100-percent apolitical company. We support neither the authorities nor the opposition, and no particular political party.”
But it wouldn’t be Russia that would arrest Durov for violating its rules.
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