Musk, Telegram and the European Assault on Online Speech

 

Executive summary

• As we have previously detailed, the EU has amassed a fierce arsenal of anti-speech legislation. But recent developments show that European politicians are determined to go beyond simply removing ‘offensive’, ‘illegal’ or ‘dangerous’ content.
• In fact, the focus of European regulators is now increasingly on stopping free speech in the first place.
• The recent revelations by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg of the secret deals offered to digital platforms to ‘self-police’ censorship of online speech are a watershed moment in the debate about free speech online. 
• They demonstrate that European regulators want to render invisible the operation of censorship: ensuring platforms remove content ‘voluntarily’ without the overt influence of regulators or politicians.
• The arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov takes the next logical step in this development: if platforms refuse to engage in the ‘voluntary’ censorship of speech, those who operate them will be arrested and prosecuted.
• These two developments demonstrate that the focus of European regulators – led and cheered by the EU elite – have moved into a dangerous new era of speech regulation. This is no longer ‘merely’ a case of censoring speech but preventing ‘offending’ speech from taking place at all. 
• Worryingly, the EU’s authoritarianism has emboldened other political elites across the world to increase a similar assault on free speech in the name of countering hate and disinformation – from the UK to the US to Brazil.
• It is high time for a determined fightback against the censorious and anti-democratic ethos that has come to dominate EU and European elites. 

Introduction

If anyone thought our report Controlling the Narrative: The EU’s Attack on Online Speech was an exaggeration, then events since the EU Parliamentary elections should be a wake-up call. Elon Musk’s revelation that Thierry Breton, the EU Commissioner for Internal Markets and chief censorship mogul behind the Digital Services Act (DSA), offered immunity from prosecution to X (under the DSA) if Musk was willing to secretly censor speech on the platform in the run-up to the election, has highlighted the critical point of our report; namely, that the EU’s narrative of hate speech and disinformation is not a well-meaning one but a dictatorial authoritarian bid to control and manipulate outcomes – all in the name of defending democracy.

The Paris arrest of the founder and now CEO of the social media platform Telegram, Pavel Durov, while ordered by a French Court, shows how the drive to control the narrative by Europe’s political elite is now on a war footing. The target is not curbing ‘disinformation’ but the spurious and perilous idea of holding the owner of a social media platform criminally responsible for content posted by users on their platform. 

It is naïve to think this has nothing to do with free speech. What’s at stake here is the existence of Telegram as an independent outlet for free expression, which the EU technocratic elite are desperate to control. The attack on Durov is a thinly disguised assault on the independence of the 21st Century public square.

These developments reveal the depth of the cynicism and duplicity of a democratically unaccountable elite who are not only drunk on their power but grossly contemptuous of democracy and the people in whose name they rule. Most worryingly, the EU’s authoritarianism has emboldened other political elites in the West to increase a similar assault on free speech in the name of countering hate and disinformation – from Keir Starmer in the UK through the Biden administration’s manipulation of the media and demands on Meta to censor speech on their platform through to the banning of X in Brazil for non-compliance with demands for censorship.

These examples reveal that we are indeed on a slippery slope, and the defence of free speech is skating on fragile ice. From Brazil, through Telegram in France to Breton in Brussels, the attack on free speech is gathering pace. This mini-report makes the conclusions we set out in our report even more urgent. We stated ‘the need for a campaign that unequivocally argues that the only legitimate counter to hateful speech and the disinformation narrative is free speech and that more speech in the court of public opinion is the only long-term defence of democracy in Europe’. 

Freedom from speech is now being globalised and institutionalised across the West. The fight is truly on.

 

I: The rise and rise of anti-democratic authoritarianism

When we published our report Controlling the Narrative: The EU’s Attack on Online Speech in the run-up to the EU Parliamentary elections, we warned that the EU elite was on an endless crusade to curb free speech to assert their need to control the narrative. We suggested that the hate speech and disinformation narratives are just that – narratives – aimed at controlling what can or cannot be said in the European political arena to ensure the dominance of the Brussels federal and cosmopolitan world view.

One of the critical points of the report was how it highlighted the systemic character of the censorship dynamic in the EU and how this was gathering pace. 

We noted that through laws like the DSA, the EMFA, the AIA, the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation and the regulation of political advertising, Brussels had enabled a censorship operating system – a legal censorship citadel headed up by an invisible ‘Ministry of Truth’ – which aims to monitor and police speech to ensure their political narrative remains dominant. 

The report also noted how the EU’s cynical manipulation of the asserted threat posed by generative AI has been used to justify Brussels adopting this same technology in its crusade against free speech. We noted how the dangers of algorithmic manipulations, the very technology the EU holds responsible for the spread of fake news or hate speech, became righteous tools when recruited to support their crusade against hate speech. 

The report concluded as follows:

‘The hate speech narrative, with its fundamentally flawed assertion of a link between speech and violence, is not a truth beyond contestation. It is a ruse, not reality. It is the creation of a fragile technocratic oligarchy that fears free speech lest it question its version of the truth and raise fundamental questions about its right to rule. Most importantly, it is a means to one end: muzzling the people it regards with contempt, who are seen as targets for intervention rather than morally autonomous agents who can distinguish truth from fiction and from officially sanctioned disinformation…

‘The EU’s narrative about curbing hate speech is essentially a hate campaign aimed at the peoples of Europe – one disguised as a defence of European values and democracy. Social media targeting seeks to muzzle both the ‘social’ and the media. Brussels’ contempt for the ordinary people of Europe and their assumed inability to think for themselves means that behind this system of control lies a draconian authoritarianism. Free speech is the enemy: freedom from speech is its default response.’

Events that have come to light since the EU Parliamentary elections prove the accuracy of these conclusions. 

Elon Musk’s tweet exposing the EU Commission’s Faustian offer of a secret censorship-for-immunity-from-prosecution deal under the Digital Services Act shows that freedom of speech has been displaced by the draconian authoritarianism of ‘freedom’ from speech. 

Moreover, it displays the depth of the cynicism and duplicity of a democratically unaccountable elite who not only abuse their power but grossly disrespect the people in whose name they rule.

 

II: The EU’s Digital Dictatorship

When Thierry Breton offered immunity from prosecution to X under the DSA if Musk was willing to secretly censor speech on the platform in the run up to the election, he never dreamt that this behind-closed-doors offer would be made public. But to Elon Musk’s credit, he exposed the sordid details and revealed that X had refused to cooperate with the deal, but that Facebook and Google had.

In one tweet, Musk exposed the arrogant hypocrisy of the Brussels elite and their so-called allegiance to defending European values like democracy and free speech. What makes this even more galling is that in the run-up to and throughout the recent elections, Brussels was constantly exaggeratingly warning that Europe was under threat of fake news, disinformation, and hate speech emanating from Russia. At the same time, as we noted in our report, European citizens were under an actual attack from the anti-democratic and hateful, censorious attitude of EU elites. 

However, doing backroom deals with social media platforms to conceal censorship from the electorate is neither an accident nor unexpected. In our report, we have highlighted how, in 2016, when the Commission introduced the Code of Conduct Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online without passing it through the European Parliament, a backroom deal was struck with social media platforms to police online speech. The Code referred to the framework for removing (without due process) what the Commission felt to be the illegal spread of hate speech online. As noted, this set the scene for the birth of the most extensive censorship Trojan Horse on the planet – the Digital Services Act driven by Thierry Breton himself.

As our report catalogued, under the Code of Conduct, Big Tech began to use automation and machine learning with help from human ‘fact checkers' to enforce hate speech laws and the removal of posts deemed to be ‘disinformation.’ Meta, for example, cavalierly boasted that using human decision-making to train and make their technology ‘more accurate’, had improved their ability to police the online space . In its Community Standards Enforcement Report (for the third quarter of 2021), the company said its proactive removal rate for hate speech was 96.5 per cent. During the reporting period, 22.3 million pieces of hate speech were removed. YouTube’s enforcement report (Q3 of 2021) records that between July-September 2021, 5,901,241 videos were removed through AI moderation, 233,349 from user moderation, 85,791 from trusted flaggers, 9,471 from NGOs and 30 from governmental agencies.

The Code of Conduct is important because it shows that the EU's behaviour has been systematic from 2016 onwards through to the DSA . 

The greatest thing about Musk’s exposure is that this is now in the open, that this censorious mentality has been brought into the cold light of day.

The EU elite's duplicitous contempt for the electorate and democracy is now an open secret. Their institutionalised authoritarianism rests upon a cocky, elitist but flimsy belief that they and their experts know what’s best for society and, thus, they have the right, indeed, the duty to decide what is acceptable or unacceptable speech even if it means flaunting their own Rule of Law. And to what end? Not to serve democracy but their narrow interests, to control the narrative so they can manipulate outcomes to protect the status quo.

If this was not clear before the election or if people chose to ignore our report, this one development has conclusively revealed that the EU’s narrative of hate speech and disinformation is not a well-meaning one but a dictatorial authoritarian bid to control and manipulate outcomes – all in the name of defending democracy.

The importance of this cannot be overstated. The Rule of Law, the much-vaunted core European value cherished by Brussels, is nothing more than a blunt instrument, yielded or ignored, depending upon the needs of the EU elite at any one time. That the EU could propose a deal with Big Tech that would immunise them from prosecution under the DSA, the law passed to police speech online under the threat of massive fines, demonstrates that the objective of all this was never protection or upholding the law. The DSA is nothing more than a legal charade, a masquerade under which the EU elite exercise their power, in this case by outsourcing their censorship needs. 

Musk revealed in one tweet that the real aim of the DSA has always been for Big Brussels to dictate what can and cannot be said online. Musk shows that the EU has enshrined freedom from speech as an organising principle rather than upholding any modicum of democratic process or accountability.

Musk has also shown that a core component of the EU elite’s modus operandi lies in bypassing Parliament and member-state scrutiny to effectively outsource censorship in Europe. Through an extra-legal alliance of unelected and unaccountable entities and organisations along with Big Tech and backroom deals, the EU operates a ‘Ministry of Truth’, which is hidden from public view and scrutiny and is, thus, wholly unaccountable. 

While the EU elite screamed from the rooftops about the danger of Putin-inspired ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ during the elections, they were acting like Putin as authoritarian gatekeepers dictating what would be acceptable or unacceptable speech in the ‘free’ European elections, even offering immunity if Big Tech censored and curbed free speech during an election.

No doubt, there is more of this detritus which will come to light in the coming months. Big questions remain unanswered. Musk refused to comply with the ‘offer you cannot resist’ and exposed its existence to the public. But what about Meta and Google? Did they comply? And if they did, what did they censor during the elections? More importantly, what about the post-election period? Does this hidden censorship continue?

 

III: Exposing the "alliance of unaccountables"

The implied complicity of Big Tech with Breton’s censorship request also highlights an important relationship which underpins Brussels’ censorship operating system. In our report, we explained the critical role of the ‘unholy alliance of unaccountables’ – the relationship between the EU Commission and unelected bodies like NGOs, corporations and the Courts – which forms the backbone of the EU’s ‘Ministry of Truth’. 

How this operates is critical to maintaining the pretence that Brussels upholds democracy. Every unelected player – from the self-appointed NGO ‘fact checkers’ through the Courts to Big Tech – is insulated from any blame for the systemisation of censorship. Until Musk’s exposure, they were hidden from view and basked in the shadow of the Rule of Law, absolving themselves from any responsibility for the authoritarian assault on free speech. They were untouchable. In our report parroting Jim Malone, the cop played by Sean Connery in the movie, ‘The Untouchables’, we noted that it was not the ‘Chicago Way’ but the ‘Brussels Way’. But Musk has made this unholy alliance very touchable! And it is something we need to take very seriously.

The danger the EU elite pose to democracy should be clear to anyone willing to open their eyes. It is not only Musk’s revelations that have exposed the hidden hand of censorship. Academic studies have challenged the EU’s claims about the dangers of disinformation, like the essay published by  Harvard Kennedy School, ‘Misinformation reloaded? Fears about the impact of generative AI on misinformation are overblown^’.

Contrary to every assertion about the spread of hate speech and disinformation online, this report suggests that, on its own, it has no causal effect on the world. In their follow-up article titled, ‘AI’s impact on elections is being overblown’ published on 3 September 2024 by MIT Technology Review , these same authors conclude, after examining the evidence of ‘a substantial number of this year’s elections’, that the ‘early alarmist claims about AI and elections appear to have been blown out of proportion’. As decades of research on the limited influence of mass persuasion campaigns in elections, the complex determinants of voting behaviours, plus the indirect and human-mediated causal role of technology reveal,  the non-threat of ‘disinformation’ was a foregone conclusion.

Yet, there are no signs that the EU’s disinformation crusade has faltered or slowed down. If anything, it has gathered pace. 

The sanctimonious proclamation Thierry Breton sent to Elon Musk over a planned interview with Donald Trump on X regurgitated the specious claims of the danger of ‘disinformation’. Besides the sheer arrogance of intervening in the American elections, Breton’s message (no doubt fuelled by Musk’s earlier exposé) was driven by the equally spurious lead of Kier Starmer, who pinned the blame for the recent rioting in the UK on ‘misinformation’ and ‘harmful speech’. But, as Jacob Reynolds pointed out, the ambiguity of mixing the charge of ‘incitement to violence’—in most jurisdictions, a long-standing and tightly-defined offence—with the utterly nebulous concepts of ‘promoting hatred’ and spreading ‘disinformation’ is entirely intentional: what Breton and the EU want is to promote the ‘disinformation’ narrative to enable the carte blanche removal of any content that questions the EU narrative.

Despite the dire warnings issued by Breton, Musk’s interview went ahead, and surprise, surprise, there were no riots in European cities. Yet the narrative endures. The announcement that the US Department of Justice is seizing dozens of websites allegedly used by the Russian government to spread disinformation to meddle with the presidential election will prove to be yet another ‘disinformation’ fantasy. 

Part of the same allegations is the revelation in court filings claiming that a ‘substantial part of Russia’s efforts also targeted Europe’. According to the Politico EU Influence newsletter, the 277-page dossier shows how the Kremlin specifically wanted to influence European players in the media, politics and business, as well as influencers, as part of their plan to weaken the US. Yet, even if this were true, the apparent goal of dividing society in Germany and France, to escalate ‘the conflict situation through the use of available tools (traffic redirection, work with comments, work with influencers, analytical articles, augmented reality, media mirror outlets, fakes, etc.) to destabilise the societal situation’, is pure fantasy. If such plots did not exist, the EU digirati would have to make them up to maintain their disinformation and hate speech narrative. 

The presence of websites or whatever had no impact on the outcome of the recent EU elections. And they will not have any consequences for the forthcoming US elections.

What this and Breton’s recent intervention in the US elections reveal is just how real the need is for the EU to maintain their crusade against free speech. One key point made in our report was that the inner needs of the EU elite, particularly their crisis of authority, lie behind this behaviour. The danger is palpable. If one questions this, the arrest of Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram in Paris, should be a wake-up call. 

While this may appear to be tendentious to developments in the EU, Durov was arrested and charged under the auspices of a French Court, not the EU. However, the EU’s crusade against free speech is the context which has enabled such draconian developments. The implications of this case go far beyond Europe. Indeed, it highlights how the EU’s anti-free speech dynamic enables a far greater crackdown on this fundamental democratic right in many Western democracies globally. We will return to this in the final part of this paper.

 

IV: Telegram and freedom from speech in Europe and beyond

The arrest and charging of Pavel Durov – a social media owner and executive – is a remarkable and genuinely worrying development. 

One of the most notable issues surrounding the arrest and charging of Durov is how quickly the narrative changed from one about free speech to one relating to criminality and social media owners’ liability for the content their platforms enable. 

‘The Durov case is not about free speech’, declared the Financial Times editorial board. Well, not directly; it was quick to qualify. Instead, the paper insisted that the case centres on Telegram’s alleged failures to address criminality on its platform, including drug peddling and child sexual abuse material. Despite Telegram’s often heroic defence of free speech and opposition to censorship, the FT warned that this should not ‘mean allowing criminal content’. 

What gives credibility to the idea that the Telegram case has little to do with free speech is that Durov’s arrest followed an investigation by the Paris prosecutor into organised crime, child sex abuse images, fraud and money laundering on the platform. Mainly motivated by 

some high-profile cases of sexual abuse against children (cases from the 1980s before Durov was even born and when a telegram was a message sent by telegraph delivered in written or printed form), which prompted the creation of a commission on incest and child sexual abuse in 2001 and a police unit dedicated to child protection last year, the French Courts decided it was time to act after the platform failed to respond to judicial requests.

It is important to note that Durov’s arrest was not directly related to the Digital Services Act . Telegram is being prosecuted under French national law, not EU law. Indeed, as Jennifer Rankin reported in The Guardian, the European Commission has consciously kept its distance from the French investigation into Durov. ‘It is purely a criminal investigation at national level, carried out by the French authorities … based on French criminal law,’ a spokesperson said. ‘It has nothing to do with the DSA.’

However, Telegram's prosecution has everything to do with the DSA and the EU. The fact that the DSA exists and that Brussels has been waging a war on free speech online for the past decade has emboldened the French Courts to arrest and charge the owner of a social media platform for posts they have nothing to do with. It is not disinformation or hate speech that is being targeted, but Telegram’s very existence as an independent social media platform, which millions of people have turned to as an alternative to the mainstream, mainly US-dominated Big Tech platforms. 

If Durov is found guilty, where will a legitimate line be drawn for all social media platforms or other Internet-based technologies? What’s to stop any government from arresting Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, for the same ‘crime’ of allowing users to use their technology to commit crimes? After all, it is safe to assume that organised criminals, terrorists, child paedophile groomers, and even ‘far-right’ populists have used iPhones to discuss and organise their activities. Before the Internet, this would be like arresting the owner of a publishing company for distributing books that have motivated people to commit crimes, even child abuse. 

It is precisely because the EU has established legally, politically and morally, their right to determine what can be said, thought or published online that has provided the context within which a social media mogul is now regarded as a legitimate target by a national court.

It is not disinformation or hate speech that the French authorities want to halt on Telegram. But emboldened by Brussels, the target is Telegram’s existence. 

Indeed, as night follows day, the EU quickly launched an investigation into Telegram’s claim to be just under the 41m active monthly users in the EU, which enabled them to escape the DSA’s strictures. In May this year, Vĕra Jourová, a European Commission vice-president, told Bloomberg that ‘Telegram is an issue.’ ‘We are now checking whether the figure is right’, she said, adding that ‘even the smallest platforms can do a very dangerous job in several member states’, referring to Telegram’s popularity in eastern EU countries with significant Russian-speaking minorities.

Whatever one might think about Telegram, it has come to represent an alternate social media platform for millions of users, such as Meta, Instagram, TikTok, and X. Indeed, and somewhat embarrassing for Brussels, Telegram has become essential for those that the EU claims to defend, Russian opposition activists and a crucial part of the public sphere in Ukraine. Durov was Putin's public enemy for a while because of how opposition activists used his other network, VKontakte (VK) (meaning InContact). Yet, this has not hampered the juggernaut of the EU crusade against free speech.

It is not just that Telegram remains an independent entity. The nerve of its owner, who remains resolute that he will resist all attempts to censor speech on his platform, provokes a visceral reaction in Brussels, indeed, in all of Europe’s political elite – including the UK. Like Elon Musk, Durov’s intransigence on external moderation and protecting his users' privacy is a challenge the EU elite cannot accept. They demand a monopoly over the narrative and the means to control it and will stop at nothing to get it.

Whether it is a national court or Brussels taking the initiative, the overarching dynamic is to extend  the curbs on free speech. Indeed, one example was demonstrated when Thierry Breton was accused by accessnow – an NGO committed to defending and extending digital rights of people and communities at risk around the world – of abusing his powers when he commented during a discussion of the unrest in the UK mentioned above, that the arbitrary blocking of online platforms could be an enforceable and justified measure under the Digital Services Act . As a letter coordinated by accessnow and signed by 60 related NGOs pointed out, the DSA does not provide for such powers. Doing so would ‘reinforce the weaponisation of internet shutdowns, which includes arbitrary blocking of online platforms by governments worldwide’. 

The point, however, is that the DSA, like the Rule of Law discourse in Europe, is a ‘flexible friend’ for the political elite. They will use, abuse, or ignore it when it suits their purposes. The Telegram case demonstrates the extent to which they are willing to go to protect their monopoly over the political narrative.

 

V: The globalisation of freedom from speech

The EU’s crusade against free speech is a much-underestimated and little-understood phenomenon. As a regulatory power, the EU is a global force. What Brussels does has an impact way beyond its borders. As the Telegram case demonstrates, it has encouraged national courts in France. In countries like Brazil, it has reached the point where a court has banned X because of Elon Musk’s unwillingness to comply with online censorship.

Of course, Brazil and its courts have sovereignty and have not been subject to any behind-the-scenes pressure. Any conspiratorial suggestion misses the point altogether. There is no need for a conspiracy theory to explain the dynamic behind this truly draconian authoritarian development in Brazil. The same dynamic that underpins and drives the EU elite’s behaviour operates in Brazil, the UK, and the USA.

But the EU is important in this respect because, unlike these other western democracies, it has always suffered a crisis of authority from its inception. Brussels has institutionalised a fear of the open-ended unpredictability of free speech and elections. This has only intensified in recent years, as, across the EU, political forces are on the rise that view European culture and history differently and are questioning the status quo. 

The fragility of the EU technocratic oligarchy has always been prevalent. The EU elite has always been driven by a technocratic impulse that believes it and its self-appointed experts know what’s best for the people of Europe. It has been and remains the West’s anti-free speech vanguard trailblazer. But what has changed is that the same crisis of authority has developed in many Western democracies, one that is characterised by a fragile elite that is increasingly out of touch with their electorates. 

We have seen this in the USA since the election of Donald Trump and in the UK, particularly since the Brexit vote. It is thus not surprising, for example, that in the US, the government has been at the forefront of promoting disinformation. One prominent example is the disinformation campaign led by the Democrats over Joe Biden, where all the self-appointed ‘fact-checkers’ and ‘anti-disinformation’ initiatives told the public there was nothing wrong with Joe Biden. However, it was all flipped on its head in the space of five minutes when the rapid-onset dementia of the President was displayed on TV. 

An even more damning example came to light recently when Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologised for Meta’s shameful role in acceding to government pressure to censor content during Covid-19 and for downplaying the New York Post’s coverage about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election that the FBI warned was ‘Russian disinformation’. Just like the example of Thierry Breton, the US administration has been revealed as cavalier about democracy and freedom of speech as Brussels’ technocratic elite.

These examples show that we are indeed on a slippery slope, and the defence of free speech is skating on very thin ice. From Brazil, through Telegram in France to Breton in Brussels, the attack on free speech is gathering pace.

The conclusion to our report stressed the need for a campaign to demonstrate that the only legitimate counter to hateful speech and the disinformation narrative is free speech and that more speech in the court of public opinion is the only long-term defence of democracy in Europe. 

The developments since the election have revealed how urgent this task is. The good news is that some of the detritus of the EU elite’s hateful campaign against the European people has been exposed for all to see. It is worth recalling the warning Albert Einstein left us with when he argued that the world is a dangerous place to live. This is ‘not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.’

Now, we need to work more to expose even more and to rekindle the old European Enlightenment values of open and free debate where freedom of speech becomes a lived value and freedom from speech gets despatched to the dustbin of history.