Telegram’s Durov case: should tech CEO bear responsibility for users’ crimes?

From Geopolitics Live (This is a Telegram channel)

French authorities announced preliminary charges against Telegram CEO Pavel Durov for allegedly enabling criminal activities on his messaging app. He was ordered to pay €5 million bail and barred from leaving France while the probe continues.

Sputnik reached out to international experts to ask if social media bosses should be held personally responsible for what happens on their apps.

Zach Vorhies, a former senior software engineer at YouTube and Google turned whistleblower, believes that “in an era where a digital footprint can directly lead to a jail cell, the concept of ‘privacy by design’ becomes not just a best practice but a moral imperative.”

He stressed that “if tech companies continue to acquiesce to government demands that undermine user privacy, we may be witnessing the end of digital anonymity as we know it.”

Ryan Hartwig, Facebook whistleblower and co-author of Behind the Mask of Facebook said: “No, social media owners shouldn’t be responsible for what is on their platform, unless they are aware of illegal activity and do nothing to stop it or report it.”

“A dictatorship can declare political activity illegal, thus instantly turning millions of political posts into ‘illegal content’,” Hartwig said.

Philip Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest and former CIA field officer, said it was clear that “if free speech is the standard there should be no such responsibility as the actual poster is the one who should be responsible for the content if it is criminal in nature.”

“To behave otherwise would require a massive censorship presence as well as detailed rules about what is acceptable, which would defeat the purpose of having free speech online,” he said.

My notes:

Altogether too much is made of this question, which is probably not a very intelligent question.  But it is a question that comes up as a result of our lives becoming technology and software-driven.  Like everything, it is wonderful, but also carries a lot of risk.

Should the vehicle manufacturer be held responsible for a driver’s drunkenness?

Should the pilot be held responsible if the airplane door falls off?

Should the manufacturer or the producer be held responsible if they eat food that they know they are allergic to?

Should the booz maker be held responsible for drunkenness?

Should the cocaine supplier be held responsible for a junkie’s use?

How much of a pearl clutcher do you, or I, want to be while these issues persist and we are in a moment of moving to a highly technological world?  I call rather for freedom, so that people can grow up and understand what they are responsible for, and mostly it is the use of something that is made available.  Seldom is it the other guy’s fault.

And so we can go on.

Years ago, while I was still in a career of being an industrial psychologist, there was a course that I presented.  The idea of this course was Response-Able, i.e., how able are we to respond to curved balls from the universe?  What are our problem-solving mechanisms and methods and skills?  This was a director-level and executive-level course.  It was a course with many tears as people started realizing how very fragile we are inside of our human being.  (That was the idea and perversely, being a little wild at the time, I threw curved balls at those I did not like – Universe intervened and made me a little bit more responsible.  From the perspective of those who attended, they received good input, from our perspective, yes, it was a nasty career, we were selecting those who could be future directors and executives).

Generally, we can select our media, as we can select a car or an airplane ticket or food or drugs.  Hence there is a misunderstanding of what a technical application is.  It is usually a structure, a platform, and how you use it, is by your selection and not by the selection of the guy who envisaged, designed, and built it.

Garland Nixon in discussion with Joti Brar:

“They want to use Telegram as an intelligence tool”

Western intelligence services are planning to make Telegram more similar to Meta* products and take control of the messenger. This opinion was expressed by American political scientist Harland Nixon in a conversation with Izvestia.

He clarified that the US government wants Telegram users to see the messenger as a secure communication channel, while their data will be collected by intelligence agencies.

Nixon believed that the American government needed a “pro-imperialist instrument” that would allow US intelligence agencies to “know what people they consider enemies are doing.”

In the future days of Telegram, we have to watch it carefully.  Do remember that something like the Arab spring was a double-edged sword instrument, as the designers and organizers of the spring pretended to be anti-hegemon and it worked, for a while.