Durov was supposed to have dinner with Macron on night of his arrest – report

Telegram founder Pavel Durov has told police that he was supposed to have dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron on the day of his arrest, respected French investigative newspaper Le Canard Enchaine has reported.

“Macron is perfectly capable of this kind of deceit aimed at fulfilling the mission demanded by his masters: jailing all those who defend freedom of expression! We demand explanations from Macron!” Les Patriots Party leader Florian Philippot wrote in a social media post commenting on the story.

The Elysee Palace rushed to deny the newspaper’s claims.

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Теlegram’s Durov vs Meta’s Zuckerberg: How do they stack up on censorship?

While Telegram founder Pavel Durov awaits formal charged France for allegedly allowing criminal content to be shared, no such fate is likely to befall Mark Zuckerberg.

The Meta CEO has admitted that senior Biden administration officials “pressured” him to “censor” content. Let’s see how the two social media giants and their CEOs stack up:

Zuckerberg’s Meta

Staff at the corporation have blown the whistle on its dubious end-to-end (e2e) encryption of messages and non-open source algorithm, and documented cases of censorship and manipulation of public opinion.

Scandal

In 2018 it emerged that British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica paid Facebook for user data from tens of millions of profiles in 2014, which it used to tailor political campaigns for Ted Cruz and later Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential campaign.

Censorship

Posts criticizing everything from US foreign and immigration policy to climate policies and vaccines were either deleted outright, or hidden and deranked – what is dubbed ‘shadow-banning’.

🌏 After the 2016 US elections, conservative viewpoints were suppressed under the pretext of ‘hate speech’ while liberal ones were elevated.

🌏 Biden officials "repeatedly pressured” Facebook for months to “censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire" during the pandemic, Zuckerberg has admitted. In April 2020, Facebook announced that it was imposing limits on “harmful misinformation about COVID-19.” The decision was reversed a year later.

🌏 A month before the 2020 presidential elections, Facebook suppressed the New York Post exposé of Hunter Biden’s laptop, with evidence of influence-peddling by the Biden family. Zuckerberg admitted this in a 2022 interview with Joe Rogan, claiming he was acting on FBI orders. He has now conceded that the laptop story was not 'Russian disinformation' as Democrats and the mainstream media claimed.

🌏 While Meta admitted in 2021 that Palestinian posts using words like “martyr” and “resistance” were inaccurately labeled as incitement to violence, the firm showed its hypocrisy the following year by allowing calls for violence against Russian citizens after the start of the Ukraine conflict. In March 2022 it loosened rules on violent speech for users in Eastern Europe, allowing ads with violent content.

Durov’s Telegram

The Russian-born IT entrepreneur co-created Telegram with the promise of secure message encryption, no moderation of messages. He pledged to reject reject government demands to store user’s confidential data, telephone messages and internet traffic, or to hand over keys for decrypting their texts.

🌏 Telegram’s unlimited size channels and group chats are encrypted using a combination of 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption, and a Diffie-Hellman secure key, the company says.
Telegram does not provide end-to-end encryption for common private and group chats, but does provide a secret chat feature. Telegram lets users post files with unlimited cloud storage. There is no targeted advertising or algorithmic feed.

Relations with authorities

"Telegram has historically had problems with regulators in some parts of the world because, unlike other services, we consistently defended our users' privacy and have never made any deals with governments," Durov wrote in 2017.

🌏 The US government wanted to get its hands on Telegram’s code to infiltrate the system and spy on its users, Durov revealed in an April interview with ex-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. The entrepreneur rejected pressure to allow a "backdoor" in the app for Western intelligence. Durov resisted personal “pressure” in the US, where legal authorities approached him seeking to find a way to “control Telegram better.”

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