He’s also totally correct in calling out the obvious lunge towards authoritarianism from European democracies - this must be stopped immediately:
> Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).
> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.
> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet.
This is not correct as far as I know. If Germany is persecuting someone for something written on the internet, that something is much worse than criticism. Words should still have meaning.
An embarrassing fiction, it was junk. More people are on VPNs now than were on the internet pre-2000
It's true there were ideas and principals in a wild west the younger generation will never know was the default. You could go out and have a battle with Injun's or see a lynching but it was 99.9% dust and hard work herding cows.
The internet now is a megacity, everything is amazing, there are roving gang wars to little hobbyists and anything else you can imagine.
> He’s also totally correct in calling out the obvious lunge towards authoritarianism
Yes Pavel and this is 100% correct.
China banned VPNs effectively, this will come to the West next. If the US falls there is no where to VPN to.
>Yes Pavel and this is 100% correct.
a lunge he happily helped support with telegram and vkontakte as long as the money rolled it. Poor rich guy.
The Internet truly was better when people had more control over their own experience in it. Now the modern equivalent of pop-up ads are on every blog begging you to sign up for their newsletter and you're severely restricted in how you can even interact with the handful of popular websites leftover.
Some things are better now, sure. But some are definitely worse with the control over information exposure that we've lost.
The Russian internet is far more controlled than the Western internet, with penalties up to and including arrest and death for expressing the wrong views. Russia also is actively invading Europe and sponsoring vast network of troll accounts which poison the discourse on the internet in Western countries.
This does not make his argument incorrect but it is worth keeping the context in mind before getting too cynical about western systems. That cynicism is one the explicit goals of Russian propaganda.
I don’t need Russia to tell me to be cynical of the western political situation.
To reframe it: changing these bad situations is easier than it seems. It’s not easy, but many people feel as if change were impossible.
I believe this feeling of hopelessness is one of the main reasons why political and financial fascists can rise. They yell that the world is falling apart and that they have the (final) solution. Russian bot farms amplify this narrative, helping massively to weaken democratic societies.
This is an information war and Europe has been losing it for about 10 to 20 years.
I think that is what Pavel does. Look at how he mentions chat control, but not that it was turned down and revoked. Then directly goes on to criticize Germany (who shut down chat control) for being anti freedom. He doesn't say anything that is wrong. Due to their history, Germany does not allow you to say anything you want about their politicians, deny history or praise nazism. It's that same history that makes Germany such strong proponents for privacy though, because they've lived the Surveillance state before it was cool. That is what has turned Germany is a privacy haven on par with Sweden, but where does Pavel ever mention that?
For that is the main issue with people like Pavel. It's not that the message is wrong. The internet has become mainly controlled by a couple of SoMe companies which are controlled by the aristocracy. It's that he polarizes it, but only against the west. I get why he wouldn't criticize Russia even if he wanted to, but he's certainly not walking the walk, is he? The fact that he spreads the message on X just makes it even more hypocritical. (If you think that part about X is me being "woke", please keep in mind that Twitter banned Trump.)
> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet
No you can criticize all you want. You just can’t insult them. Free speech is different in Germany than in the US. Insulting people isn’t covered by free speech.
Whether or not that is a good thing is up for debate, but Durov’s statement is plain wrong.
It's not like by going for an ad hominem you automatically win back the argument.
So just give up on trying to keep the powerful in check with laws?
No? Then what are you saying? Why not consider how this notion of banning "insult" is guaranteed to be abused?
Oh those snowflake politicians! When do they grow thick skin? /s
>Unfortunately, it's impossible to run an online business in this country. I'm afraid there's no way back for me - especially after I publicly refused to cooperate with the authorities.
What I'm seeing here is that for a lot of liberal Russians (including Durov), the West was this ideal, beacon of freedom, and many are disappointed to see it moving in the same direction as Russia. For Russia, it's obvious that free speech doesn't exist there, nothing new to say.
Now, Telegram is also an important part of military communication in Russia. Probably not that often for the chain-of-command, but there are dozens of channels that cover frontline news and war in details, and these somewhat independent media outlets are as important to the Russian government as they are to the CIA.
Durov himself lives in an unfree country
But I think it’s hypocritical to talk about freedom of speech issues in Western Europe while ignoring similar or worse restrictions in China, Russia, or Dubai, where he lives.
It’s similar to Musk’s approach — when Twitter is shut down in Brazil, it’s a freedom of speech violation, but having a Tesla factory in China suddenly makes that problem disappear there.
As I understand it, Durov doesn’t agree with your statement — you can check point 5 of his 2014 manifesto [1]
[1] https://globalvoices.org/2014/03/13/pavel-durovs-seven-reaso...
That was before the Kremlin fully launched its repressive measures against the Internet, and before he was forced to leave Russia for refusing to cooperate with the authorities.
Bull. Shit. If you break the existing laws, by insulting or slandering someone, you might have to face the consequences.
But I guess it is easy to point the finger at Germany and conjure the specter of the fascists if you live in Dubai, come from Russia, and created 2 of the biggest troll-mills ever. Would not want to rattle the cage too much, would we.
> by insulting or slandering someone
That's a bit of a straw man isn't it?
The German government makes it very easy to point fingers at them: The German minister of economics and "vice president" (vice chancellor) had so much free time and capacity to sue more than 800 citizens! https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1493232/umfra...
The vice president of a G7 country suing old men because they called him a numbnut on the internet is ridiculous.
Especially if you see the hate that was sprewed at him at every single post, news, update or whatever, i completley understand. This has nothing to do with criticizing someone - Habeck actually has a good track record of sitting down with other people and talking with them, but stuff like death threats.
More background here at politico https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-robert-habeck-files-... this were massive attacks leading up to the european election not people unhappy with "Ze Greens".
Also, on the "old man calling him an idiot”:
<< Habeck authorized prosecutors to pursue the case for the insult against him by issuing what in German is known as a "Strafantrag." However, this is different from an individually-submitted criminal complaint to law enforcement authorities known as a "Strafanzeige," and could indicate that law enforcement had first invited or asked Habeck to press the charges. Prosecutors did not specify who had approached who first.
So, not Habeck going after him, but simply saying that its ok to pursue the inquiry.
<< The Bavaria resident is also accused of posting Nazi-era imagery and language earlier in 2024. According to prosecutors, this post may have violated German laws against the incitement of ethnic or religious hatred.
Yeah, that "old guy" seems like a real treat and not at all like an asshole right-wing dumbnut.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...
The old guy was also not convicted, something the right-wingers found super cool.
For them, it's more about enabling micropayments. So far, the only successful micropayments system was advertising, and it's a real shame we couldn't build better.
You probably don't realize it, but multi-device support, group chats of tens of thousands of users, channels with millions of users and comments of said users. Attachments and history and search. And then a whole infrastructure for running bots and processing payments. And proxies to fight blocking attempts. All of these are either highly problematic or computationally intensive and practically infeasible with E2E on.
Otherwise, someone would have taken the opportunity and reimplemented Telegram on top of homomorphic encryption /s.
Was fully nodding along, and this confused me. What is that supposed to mean?
nialse•4h ago
The difference is that what once was covert in the West is now out in the open. Anonymity enabled the troll culture, famously exploited by any and all bad faith actors in their favor. Control in terms of surveillance on metadata level is just a manner of having enough endpoints at your disposal for a nation state actor.
It was a nice illusion and the wake up is kind of harsh.
SilverElfin•4h ago
Anonymity enabled honesty and free expression. FTFY.
nialse•3h ago
phs318u•3h ago
* I may be wearing rose-tinted glasses. It's been a very long time since I'd spend 4 hours a day reading and replying on various Usenet groups.
mlyle•3h ago
Unfortunately, I don't see a path back to the kind of internet where we don't need anonymity so much.
anigbrowl•3h ago
SilverElfin•2h ago
This feels revisionist. The internet was almost entirely anonymous. Whether it was “required” or not is irrelevant. People could be honest and not fear censorship.
jrflowers•3h ago
You will be blown away by stuff people post at eachother on facebook, the site where you use your real name
ljf•3h ago
a. Not all people using Facebook are using their real name,
and
b. Not all Facebook accounts are real people
jrflowers•3h ago
nialse•3h ago
At the same time you are completely right! Troll culture has enabled an era of unhinged communication. Many people have lost the little decency they had. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not immune to it.
jrflowers•2h ago
bfg_9k•3h ago
And so what if it did? That's the price we collectively pay for a free internet.