In the name of freedom of expression, many democratic countries have so far treated social media services with care. Now there is a backlash.
Is it just a coincidence, or does this rapid succession of events herald a new era? First, France arrested Telegram boss Pavel Durov – he is suspected of condoning criminal activities on his messenger platform. Durov is now free again, but is not allowed to leave the country until further notice.
Then a Brazilian judge shut down Elon Musk’s social media service X – because it was not taking decisive enough action against hate speech and fake news. Even Musk’s own internet provider Starlink has now had to block access to X in Brazil after some back and forth.
South Korea also launches investigation into Telegram
South Korea opened an investigation into Telegram this week for deepfake pornography. And now Australian authorities are demanding potentially sensitive information from eight social media companies. Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok and other services must disclose within 30 days how many children use their platforms and how they can identify and, if necessary, block underage users.
If we are not mistaken, we are currently seeing a reversal in the way Western countries deal with social media platforms – in authoritarian countries they have long been restricted or simply banned.
France’s actions in particular are unprecedented. “The fact that the founder of a platform like Telegram has been arrested: something like this has never happened before,” says Aleksandra Urman, a researcher at the Social Computing Group at the University of Zurich. Of course, Telegram is also used by drug dealers, extremists and conspiracy theorists. “But unlike the former darknet marketplace Silk Road, for example, Telegram does not earn anything from illegal business,” Urman points out.
France’s aggressive actions
Durow himself wrote in a blog post on Thursday that he was surprised by France’s decision to pursue him personally instead of simply initiating proceedings against his company. “When a country is dissatisfied with an Internet service, the usual practice is to take legal action against the service itself.” The French authorities had numerous opportunities to reach him, said Durow.
How can France’s brutal approach be explained? “Nation states react violently when their power is openly questioned. Elon Musk and Pavel Durow do this with their right-libertarian positions and their absolutization of freedom of expression,” says Martin Steiger. He is a lawyer for law in the digital space. This backlash is now also being felt by those tech companies that have always been able to somehow come to terms with the authorities.
“There has always been an unstable balance between social media platforms and states. But in the future there will probably be more disputes as the density of regulation increases and the authorities have to prove themselves,” says Steiger. He is certain that there is a great deal of unease among the established tech companies.
Content moderation is a grey area
Especially since they often operate in grey areas when moderating content on their platforms. These are difficult to avoid with self-regulation. For example, a Meta supervisory board has just decided not to ban the use of the pro-Palestinian slogan “From the river to the sea” across the board. This despite the fact that many see it as a call to wipe Israel off the map. It is difficult to imagine that there is still room for Jewish life if a Palestinian state stretches from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.
For this reason, the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Germany not only banned the terrorist organization Hamas itself, but also the slogan “From the river to the sea.” Meta, on the other hand, believes that it all depends on the context.
Such examples show how difficult it is to find a balance between freedom of expression and the prohibition of hate speech that is then accepted around the world. What is acceptable to say in the USA often goes too far from the European perspective. When it comes to naked skin, it is the other way round. We in the West know shamefully little about how people in Indonesia, Colombia or Senegal view something.
The elephant in the room
And the elephant in the room is hardly being discussed: the end-to-end encryption of messages, which is a thorn in the side not only of dictators, but also of law enforcement authorities and secret services in democracies. It seems naive to suspect that Telegram alone has problems with child pornography when Signal, Whatsapp or iMessage encrypt their users’ messages much more reliably.
There are currently no satisfactory solutions to this problem: Should providers have to install backdoors that allow systematic mass surveillance of all private messages? It would probably be better if authorities had to obtain judicial permission to hack the devices of specific people if there was reasonable suspicion.
India is currently arguing with WhatsApp on this issue and wants to force the messenger service to stop using encryption. In return, WhatsApp is threatening to leave India.
Cooperate or risk being blocked?
“In autocracies, social media platforms have always faced the difficult question of whether they want to cooperate with the state or risk being blocked,” says Aleksandra Urman. Now, in democracies, they are increasingly having to choose: “Either they invest in monitoring and moderating their users’ content, or they refuse to do so and accept the consequences – like X is now doing in Brazil.”
The dispute usually arises because states get the impression that the platforms are deliberately evading their influence, says Martin Steiger. “When their authorities have no local contacts at the companies and even obviously legitimate requests go unanswered.”
Telegram and X in particular are not afraid to offend authorities, for example by largely refraining from moderating content. They simply have less to lose than Instagram, YouTube or Tiktok, whose primary goal is to provide a good environment for advertisers and influencers.
New EU rules reinforce the backlash
Telegram, on the other hand, sells premium memberships and primarily makes price gains with its own cryptocurrency Tron – which currently has a market value of 13 billion dollars. And only Elon Musk knows what he plans to do with X. But he obviously doesn’t want to make money with this platform.
With the introduction of new European rules for online platforms, regional differences in regulation are now becoming even more pronounced: “Social media companies are usually headquartered in the USA, where by law they are explicitly not responsible for the activities of their users – or like Telegram in Dubai, where there is hardly any regulation,” says Urman.
It now appears that other countries are no longer willing to adopt the legal understanding of the USA or Dubai. “And the timing is probably not entirely coincidental: this year the Digital Services Act came into force in Europe,” says the researcher.