New Delhi: The Titanic is sinking. Water is flooding through its compartments, but everyone onboard is too busy enjoying the amenities available. Too preoccupied to realise the danger fast approaching. That is what Pavel Durov tried to convey through his speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum on 1 June.
The Telegram founder and CEO started his speech by saying, “Our ship has already hit the iceberg.”
Durov said that personal freedom for every single person across the world is at risk as more and more countries try to implement laws to restrict, manage or survey social media and messaging apps.
The 41-year-old gave the example of how the Russian government attempted to ban Telegram in the country after the social media app refused to comply with the authorities’ demands. According to Durov, the Russian government wanted access via Telegram to survey the social media platform.
He went on to say that the ban further endangers Russia’s youth because teenagers started using VPNs to access the social media app. Through VPNs, Durov explained, children are more at risk of encountering fringe content and previously banned sites, which are not available.
‘In the name of child protection’
The Russian tech entrepreneur said that most countries around the world, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Russia, and Iran, among others, are using “child protection” as an excuse to survey social media platforms and internet use.
“For five years, the European Commission has been trying to force a new set of laws that would require every messaging app to implement a backdoor to its encryption. So that everything that we share online, every private message, every private photo that we sent using apps like Telegram or WhatsApp or any other would be automatically monitored and if the system detects that we are trying to do something illegal, it alerts the authorities,” Durov said.
He added that the reasoning behind this mass surveillance is once again “child protection.” Durov said that by using this excuse, governments are trying to silence questions about the exercise because “Who doesn’t care about children?”
The French government, he said, gave a different justification for trying to pass a mandate on national surveillance. According to him, the French justification for mass monitoring was “to combat crime.”
Durov added that this sort of explanation has been used countless times across centuries of humanity.
“Give up some of your essential liberty in exchange for some temporary safety,” he said. He went on to say that such deals or offers were always a “scam.”
“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,” Durov quoted Benjamin Franklin to booming applause.
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Censorship or monitoring
Durov said that this sort of large-scale observation and ban was another form of “political censorship.”
He ended the talk by sharing an anecdote from 2024. Durov said that he was offered a deal by the head of French intelligence, who asked him to silence certain political voices. He refused and is still under investigation with the threat of jail time. He added that during his three-day interrogation, a Russian translator told him that she escaped the Soviet Union in the 1980s because she “wanted to escape an environment where my freedom is limited… But after witnessing what I’ve witnessed, I feel like the Soviet Union is catching up with me.”
Durov added that in the world of AI, if humanity gives up its right to privacy, every message, like, photo, reaction, and relationship will be scored and mapped.
“The future can become much darker and more dystopian than the Soviet Union of the 80s. So we don’t have this luxury that the passengers of the Titanic had. We cannot afford to have this ship sunk.”