US Government-Funded Censorship Arm ‘Atlantic Council’ Targeted Telegram Just Two Months Before Durov Arrest
Source : August 28, 2024
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French authorities arrested Russian-born dual UAE-French citizen Pavel Durov last weekend as he disembarked his private plane in Paris. Durov, who is the CEO and founder of popular messaging app Telegram, faces a number of serious charges from French authorities ranging from drug offenses to child sexual exploitation offenses.
Of course, none of these charges have anything to do with Durov directly but rather refer to activity that allegedly occurred on Telegram, Durov’s privacy-focused messaging app that boasts nearly 1 billion active users. It is unclear from the charging documents what exactly the French authorities’ argument is regarding Durov’s culpability, and French President Emmanuel Macron defensively took to X (formerly Twitter) to assure the public that the arrest wasn’t “political.” Nonetheless, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that Durov’s arrest is unconnected to Durov’s well-known refusals to cooperate with intelligence agencies’ censorship and law enforcement requests. Furthermore, it is inconceivable that Durov’s arrest would occur without the foreknowledge and implicit approval, if not direct complicity and urging, of the United States government. There are even reputable reports that Macron himself may have lured Durov in for his arrest, as Durov apparently told French authorities that he traveled to Paris at the invitation of Macron to have dinner with the French President. Odd indeed.
Suspicions regarding the timing and possible US complicity in Durov’s arrest are heightened by virtue of a DFR Lab-sponsored conference attacking Telegram’s refusal to censor information relevant to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab is a major censorship arm of the US regime, whose censorship activities were prominently featured in the recently released Twitter Files, as well as the associated testimony of Shellenberger to the Judiciary Committee.
House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government:
Key Organizations
[…]
Digital Forensics Research (DFR) Lab at the Atlantic Council. The lab is one of the most established and influential full-time censorship institutions in the world.17 Atlantic Council DFR Lab created the foreign-facing DisinfoPortal in June 2018, working directly with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and 23 organizations to censor election narratives leading up to the 2019 elections in Europe.18 In 2018, Facebook named Atlantic Council, an official partner in “countering disinformation” worldwide.19 US taxpayer funding to the Atlantic Council comes from the Defense Department, the US Marines, the US Air Force, the US Navy, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as energy companies and weapons manufacturers.
[…]
The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika all have inadequately-disclosed ties to the Department of Defense, the C.I.A., and other intelligence agencies. They work with multiple U.S. government agencies to institutionalize censorship research and advocacy within dozens of other universities and think tanks.
As though it’s not suspicious enough that the Atlantic Council is funded by US government intelligence agencies, the Atlantic Council was also infamously funded by notorious Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk (more on this below). Thus we see the convenient timing that two months after the Atlantic Council (censorship cutout of the US government) singles out Telegram’s problematic refusal to censor information in the Ukraine war, Durov is arrested in France. Funny how that works!
This is consistent with the findings of Mike Benz, a former State Department official and world authority on the censorship-industrial complex. Benz has reported US government-funded outlets like Radio Free Europe singling out Telegram for attack along a similar timeline (shortly after Durov’s interview with Tucker Carlson four months ago).
Durov’s arrest is without question a significant flashpoint in the critical and disturbing developments at the intersection of online censorship and geopolitics. The arrest not only confirms but also escalates a pattern that we have identified in previous pieces, whereby regimes have transitioned from mere repetitional and deplatforming attacks to the arrest, indictment, and imprisonment of those who engage in or facilitate unapproved speech. While conventional censorship in the form of deplatforming still takes place, Elon Musk’s acquisition and subsequent reorientation of Twitter in a free speech direction has significantly limited the regime’s ability to engage in censorship in the conventional sense that was revealed in the Twitter files.
Indeed, censorship on the level of the US government effectively pressuring platforms like Twitter to censor inconvenient stories (such as the Hunter laptop story) likely reached its high water mark in 2020. In the aftermath of Elon’s acquisition of Twitter and a broader tech alignment toward MAGA (with Microsoft as a conspicuous pro-Kamala holdout), even Mark Zuckerberg has recently publicly praised Trump and openly acknowledged Facebook’s role in censorship in 2020 at the behest of the national security state. Even some of the major university centers that had been dedicated to promoting the “disinformation” pretext for online censorship have gone defunct, such as Stanford University’s disgraced censorship think tank, the Stanford Internet Observatory. Such institutions were major incubators of the kind of “disinformation”-based censorship that peaked so aggressively in 2020.
Just because conventional “deplatforming”-style censorship peaked in 2020 does not mean the regime has given up. Not by a long shot. What it means is that the regime has to adapt and change its approach, and as we have mentioned above and elsewhere, this involves not just censoring and attacking, but indicting, arresting and imprisoning.
And even for those who are in the political space, there is another thing to consider: if doxxing and socially-driven “cancellation” are receding as viable regime weapons for ideological control, there are other weapons there to replace them.
Cancellation is a powerful tool of soft social control. It’s the power to get dozens, if not hundreds, of people and organizations to collude to isolate a person and demolish their life without having to exercise a single law or employ the state’s monopoly on organized violence. But never forget: The regime still has those tools. So as the soft tool of doxxing wanes, expect the regime to increase its use of more direct methods of ideological control.
[…]
But Douglass Mackey is probably the best example of all. Unlike Jones or Trump, he was an anon when he committed his “offenses.” He was targeted not for public political activity but for private actions. And yet, nevertheless, the Department of Justice went through the effort of warping a 150-year-old law, the Ku Klux Klan Act, so that it could justify trying to throw Mackey in prison for posting an anti-Hillary Clinton meme.
Expect the Mackey model to be employed more and more often, on flimsier and flimsier pretexts. Because when a regime can’t use shame to destroy its foes, there is always force.
The “Mackey model” above refers to the case of Douglass Mackey, an American citizen who was arrested, tried, and convicted of a felony for distributing memes mocking Hillary Clinton in 2016. If the regime is less able to use disinformation as a censorship pretext to pressure Twitter to deplatform users, Mackey’s case represents a thus-far successful attempt (the case is currently on appeal) to codify much of the disinformation scam into criminal law. Furthermore, Durov’s arrest might be best understood as a complement to the Mackey model. If Mackey’s arrest represents the regime’s willingness to attack and arrest citizens for unapproved speech, Durov’s arrest represents Western governments’ increasing willingness to arrest censorship-resistant tech CEOs for not playing ball like the regime lackeys that used to control Big Tech exclusively.
The dangerous precedent of the Durov arrest has elicited strong condemnation from Edward Snowden to Elon Musk.
Indeed, it’s hard not to view Durov’s arrest as a trial balloon for an imminent legal offensive on Musk, who has enraged EU authorities by refusing to cater to the censorship demands of the EU and US security establishment.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X is in breach of the European Union’s online content law, according to preliminary findings by regulators that could lead to hefty fines for the company.
The European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-member bloc, announced on Friday that the social media platform is violating the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to “dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.”
The disgraced Alexander Vindman, notorious Russia-hoax impeachment operative, has made this explicit.
Apart from its relevance to free speech per se, the Durov case is also relevant to geopolitics. Indeed, Telegram is especially known for hosting a rich repository of unmediated footage from hot-button conflict zones such as Ukraine and Gaza. Telegram’s willingness to host such unmediated, unfiltered information about geopolitical hotspots could very well have put them in the crosshairs of a variety of nation states, including Israel (the leak of whose government files was published on a telegram channel), the Ukraine, and stakeholders in the Ukraine war such as the USA or France (footage confirming direct US and Western involvement in Ukraine has circulated on telegram for some time now).
Indeed, just two months ago, the Atlantic Council’s “disinformation censorship” arm, DFR Lab, put out a video singling out Telegram for criticism. Two months later, Durov was arrested in France. Funny how that works!
The Atlantic Council, by the way, is funded by both the US Government and various Ukrainian oligarchs.
The larger geopolitical context of Durov’s arrest is perhaps the most interesting. Despite US regime propaganda trying to pin Durov as a Russian agent, Durov in fact lived as a Russian exile and was starkly at odds with the Russian government, precisely because he wouldn’t compromise Telegram’s privacy on behalf of Russia’s demands.
Durov’s life in UAE, which has staked out something of a neutral role in the US-Russia conflict as a geopolitical Switzerland, can be seen as an experimental attempt to live a life as a functionally stateless, neutral tech oligarch who shows neither fear nor favor to any of the multiple intelligence agencies approaching him.
Durov’s recent arrest shows the limitations of this approach and seems to underscore that once one reaches a certain level in things, neutrality is impossible, and there is no escaping the great geopolitical/censorship chess game taking place for the highest stakes imaginable.
We hope we are wrong on this last point and will continue to follow this case with tremendous interest.
