A firestorm erupted this week when authorities in France arrested the founder of the messaging app Telegram for activities that were taking place on the platform. Most people view this as an attempt to silence freedom of speech, as Telegram has grown to more than 1 billion users, making it more popular than Twitter. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Alright, a firestorm erupted this week when authorities in France arrested the founder of the messaging app Telegram for activities that were taking place on the platform. Most people view this as an attempt to silence free speech, myself included, as Telegram has grown to more than 1 billion users, making it even more popular than Twitter. This guy doesn’t go away, Farron, you understand? He does not just go away.
Farron Cousins: That’s what shocked me though, that this actually, there are more active users on Telegram than there are on Twitter or X. But what happened here is Pavel Durov, the man who created Telegram about 10 or so years ago, and he did it to kind of expose some government corruption. That’s what Telegram was being used for, sending these messages, essentially, Russia really wanted to take him down.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, they wanted to kill him. They wanted to assassinate the guy. I mean, really.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So he then kind of became mobile, traveling all over the world, running Telegram from different countries at various times because it was exposing a lot of what governments across the world were doing. So he’s in France where he has dual citizenship and they nab him and they nab him because they say, aha. Telegram, I don’t know if you know this, people were using it to do crimes. So you are now liable for all of those crimes.
Mike Papantonio: Totally contrary to 230, isn’t it? Isn’t 230 about the fact that we’re not responsible for what’s up there? So Russia.
Farron Cousins: And this is the other extreme of 230 though and that’s why we gotta.
Mike Papantonio: That’s exactly, that was a very good point. But here you have a guy, the Russians want to kill him because he wants to talk about all the Russian secrets. He wants to have it out there. France says, oh, we’re different from Russia. We don’t operate like Russia. We don’t censor people who are critics. This guy is the world’s biggest troller. You know, they’re mad at him for trolling authority. If I were to say, what’s he doing? He’s trolling authority. He’s trolling the people in charge of that authority. He’s talking about issues that cause these governments such angst. And if you drill right down to it, what’s he, he’s worth $9 billion. He doesn’t have a country. He’s always on the move.
Farron Cousins: And he certainly doesn’t live like our tech billions here in the United States.
Mike Papantonio: No. Hell no. He says, I reject all that. I reject the big yachts and I reject the big houses. And he says, I’m a purist where it comes to the simple message, censorship is bad. Censorship is undemocratic. Censorship will ruin us as a civilization if we allow ourselves to do it. But not France. If you follow the buildup, Macron is trying to, he said, oh, this is completely appropriate. This is something we absolutely should be doing. Well, they’re saying the same thing that Russia said. Exactly The same reasons that Russia said it. And nevertheless, we try to distinguish ourselves in the West as being so much above that fight, of that fray.
Farron Cousins: Well, and people need to understand that if we just completely were to say that section 230 goes away completely, this starts happening in the United States. Almost immediately. But at the same time, section 230 says, oh, no, no, no, y’all can do whatever the hell you want and nobody’s ever gonna hold you accountable.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: Those are two extremes that are both awful. There has to be some kind of middle ground on this. Section 230 has to be revamped. And in this case, if you have evidence that this man is helping facilitate drug deals or criminal activity then that’s one thing. But you’ve now had plenty of time, you could have made any of that public, but you didn’t. So I don’t buy it. I really don’t.
Mike Papantonio: Farron, you and I last week did a story and the story was where Facebook was pumping out drugs. I mean, selling drugs. Right. What did they accuse him of? Well, he’s promoting the sale of the drugs. We’ve talked about so many stories with virtually all of the tech companies that have been caught up in not monitoring what should be monitoring, child pornography. What did they say?
Farron Cousins: And human trafficking.
Mike Papantonio: Human trafficking. Participating in human trafficking. So what’s different? They’re saying, well, he’s doing all that. It’s the same thing. The thing they hate about him is they can control a Zuckerberg, you see, they can say, don’t troll us. Don’t troll troll me as president or me as senator or me as House of Representative. Don’t do that. Leave us alone. So they bring him up in front of Congress and he testifies. This guy says, kiss my. He says, I’m gonna do what I wanna do because it’s called freedom of speech. He’s absolutist. I mean, that’s what the guy is.
Farron Cousins: And look, if evidence comes out that shows he’s directly involved in it. Okay.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, of course, the arrest him
Farron Cousins: Then absolutely, sure.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. If he’s part of any of these rings, arrest him.
Farron Cousins: But until you come out with that hard evidence, it is hard to believe that this is not some kind of politically motivated attempt to silence this guy.
Mike Papantonio: It is happening all across the EU, Farron, that is one of the problems with the EU. You do it in Germany. We do it in France. You do it in the UK. We do it in another, in Spain. You know, that’s the problem with the EU. And so this is all being driven by the EU, which is to say, he’s different than Facebook or YouTube or any of the other tech companies, he’s different.
Farron Cousins: Well, and they hold them accountable. They say, you gotta pay us $10 billion. You gotta do this. You gotta do that. Okay. But him, no, no, no. We’re gonna arrest him.
Mike Papantonio: We’re gonna put you in jail, buddy, because we don’t like you trolling our politicians. Macron, he beat the hell out of Macron all the time because he said, the guy’s a fraud. He’s covering up what’s really happening in France. Macron didn’t like that. So he said, let’s go arrest the guy. Farron, thanks for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all the time we have. But all these segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in the coming week. Make sure you subscribe. I’m Mike Papantonio and this has been America’s Lawyer where we tell you stories every week that corporate media can’t tell you, ladies and gentlemen. They won’t tell you because their advertisers don’t allow for it. Or a company, a tech or a corporate company that does media, can’t tell you the story because of their connections to a political party. They’re either too Republican or too Democrat, and they can’t tell you the story. They can’t color outside the line because they’re gonna make their benefactors angry about it. We don’t have that problem here. And hopefully we’ll see you next time.
