Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Теlegram’s Durov vs Meta’s Zuckerberg: How Do They Stack Up on Censorship?

By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 27.08.2024

While Telegram founder Pavel Durov waits to be formally charged by French prosecutors for multiple charges relating to the platform’s lack of moderation, no such fate is likely to befall Mark Zuckerberg. The CEO of Meta has admitted his company opted to accede to the US government’s demands to censor content.

While Telegram founder Pavel Durov waits to be formally charged by French prosecutors for multiple charges relating to the platform’s lack of moderation, no such fate is likely to befall Mark Zuckerberg.

Unlike Durov, the Meta CEO has admitted to what was an open secret anyway: that he caved to repeated White House demands to throttle content on his platform. Senior Biden administration officials, “pressured” Meta to “censor” content, acknowledged Zuckerberg in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on August 26.

Elon Musk was quick to note there’s be no arrest for Zuck as he “censors free speech and gives governments backdoor access to user data.”

Let’s see how the two platforms and their CEOs line up:

Pavel Durov

The Russian-born IT entrepreneur co-created Telegram – a blend of private messaging and public channels –with his brother in August 2013. Durov vowed to champion encryption in messaging, not allow the moderation of messages, deny requests to store records of confidential data, telephone messages and internet traffic of clients, or hand over keys for decrypting users’ correspondence upon request.

“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.”

Telegram’s unlimited in size “channels” and group chats are encrypted using a combination of 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption, and Diffie-Hellman secure key, per the Telegram team. Telegram doesn’t provide end-to-end encryption for common private and group chats, but does provide a secret chat feature. Telegram lets users post files enjoying unlimited cloud storage. There is no targeted advertising or algorithmic feed. The platform’s audience exceeded 950 million users by July 2024.

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 law enforcement officials approached him, seeking to “establish a relationship to in a way control Telegram better.”

“[But] for us running a privacy-focused social media platform, that probably wasn’t the best environment to be in. We want to be focused on what we do, not on government relations of that sort,” Durov said.

Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg turned his Meta (formerly Facebook) into a tool for US censorship. The platform with its standard for messaging apps end-to-end (e2e) encryption and non-open source algorithm has served up documented cases of censorship and manipulation of public opinion proven by whistleblowers and information leaks. After the 2016 US elections, conservative viewpoints were suppressed under the pretext of “hate speech” while liberal ones were elevated.

In 2018 it was revealed that UK-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica engaged in the harvesting of tens of millions of Facebook profiles in 2014. They were used to target users with personalized political ads, including during the 2016 US presidential campaign. The company engaged in similar harvesting and vote manipulation operations in nations across the globe.

Posts criticizing everything from US foreign and immigration policy, climate policies, to vaccines were occasionally deleted outright, but more often hidden or deranked.
Used as an election manipulation tool, whistleblowers have documented Facebook’s skewed content moderation directives regarding candidates and their supporters, in direct violation of the company’s policy on protecting political speech.

Facebook barred Donald Trump from the platform in the wake of the 6 January Capitol riot after being accused of “incitement of violence”. He was reinstated his account had “new guardrails in place.”

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

On the eve of the 2020 presidential elections Facebook suppressed the New York Post story based on damning files in Hunter Biden’s laptop containing evidence of a pay-to-play corruption scheme by the Biden family.

Mark Zuckerberg admitted that in an interview with Joe Rogan in 2022, claiming he was ordered to censor the story by the FBI. He has now conceded that the Hunter laptop story was not “Russian disinformation,” as it was alleged at the time by the Democrats and the mainstream media.

While Meta admitted in 2021 that Palestinian posts using words like “martyr” and “resistance” were inaccurately labeled as incitement to violence, the platform revealed its hypocrisy the following year. Meta openly supported calls for violence against Russian citizens after the start of the special military operation. In March 2022 it loosened prohibitions on violent speech for users in Eastern Europe, allowing the placement of ads with such content.

August 27, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | 1 Comment

Gaza and Polio

By Richard Hugus | August 27, 2024

On July 30, 2024 the Health Ministry of Gaza declared a polio epidemic in Gaza. The World Health Organization then said it would send more than a million polio vaccine doses to Gaza. On August 16, according to Al-Jazeera, the first case was reported and the UN’s Antonio Guterres called for a ceasefire to make a vaccination campaign possible. This call was supported by Hamas.

Health authorities rightly point out that the cause of the horrific health conditions in Gaza is the ongoing Israeli genocide – the bombing of homes and infrastructure, the shelling, the withholding of food and medical supplies, the sadistic evacuations — and the authorities of course call for all these things to end. But the involvement of globalist agencies like the UN and WHO raise suspicions that the polio declaration may be just another attack on the people of Gaza concealed under a cloak of humanitarianism.

According to Al-Jazeera, the announcement of the alleged outbreak came on August 7 from one Dr. Hamid Jafari, a World Health Organization polio specialist who claimed the polio virus was found in wastewater samples in Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis. Dr. Jafari is currently employed by the US Centers for Disease Control, a deeply corrupt organization which has spent the past three years pushing vaccines for another purported virus – covid 19 – in spite of clear proof from the very beginning of multiple harms caused by the vaccine. This harm is not limited to the US. Denis Rancourt and colleagues have recently offered statistical proof of almost 31 million excess deaths globally for the period 2020-2022, deaths which they attribute to the strangely universal worldwide public health response to covid 19, to include lockdowns, business closures, isolation, harmful hospital protocols, and particularly the mRNA vaccines.

Regarding Dr. Jafari in Gaza, The CDC website tell us that he “is a graduate of CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program, class of 1992. . .  currently serving as the Principal Deputy Director, Center for Global Health, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The website goes on to say that “Dr. Jafari served as the project manager of World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) National Polio Surveillance Project in India from 2007-2012. As the project manager, he was the main technical advisor to the government of India in the implementation of the nation’s large scale polio eradication, measles control, and routine immunization activities, and he directed WHO’s extensive network of more than 2000 field staff.”

Thus Dr. Jafari was in in charge of a vaccination campaign in India where, in one study, researchers found that between 2000–2017 there were “an additional 491,000 paralyzed children” above normal. The ambitious “polio eradication” program in India was funded and led by the Gates Foundation and the WHO. The number of paralysis cases was found to be proportional to the number of vaccine doses administered. The Gates Foundation and WHO are not exactly separate entities – Gates is a major funder of the WHO. Dr. Jafari’s employment at the CDC, his authoritative declaration of a polio epidemic in Gaza, and WHO’s immediate announcement of the shipment of over a million vaccines should raise red flags.

Polio is a condition that is often confused with the catchall “acute flaccid paralysis.”  Acute flaccid paralysis may even be the result of injection of polio “vaccines, but it is not polio. The polio vaccine can and does cause acute flaccid paralysis. From experience in the US since the 1950s it is known that what was often called polio was not the gut virus that humans have lived with more or less uneventfully throughout history, but a form of paralysis caused by human exposure to neurotoxins introduced in the 20th century — for example, mercury and aluminum adjuvants used in vaccines, leaded fuel, fluoridated water, pesticides and herbicides like arsenic, DDT, dioxin, and glyphosate. DDT was in widespread use in the 1950s. When it was banned, the high numbers of “polio” cases went down. The famous Salk and Sabin vaccines had little to do with it, though the medical establishment claimed victory. Indeed, as we know from what is called “the Cutter incident”  in 1955, vaccines produced by Cutter Laboratories ended up causing 40,000 cases of polio, severely paralyzed 200 children, and killed 10. Later iterations of the vaccine were found to contain a cancer-causing agent called SV-40 (SV being short for ‘simian virus’). Bernice Eddy, the scientist who discovered this, was hounded out of her job at the US National Institute of Health. Lest one think that things are surely more advanced now than in the 1950s, as recently as April 2023 a well-known scientist named Kevin McKernan found SV-40 in samples of the Pfizer covid -19 vaccine. A new term was coined to describe a common effect of the covid injections — “turbo cancer” — perhaps attributable to the SV-40 and the normally forbidden DNA plasmids also found in the samples.

In an emergency involving a projected 2,700 aid workers delivering 1.6 million doses over a short period of time (between bombings), will the parents of the one million children in Gaza be given complete information about the contents of the polio vaccine their children are about to be given? Will there be a full explanation about risks and possible side-effects? Will the parents have any understanding of the negative history of polio vaccines or of vaccines in general? Will they have the informed consent required in any medical intervention? Will they be given redress for any injuries? No, not a chance. The instructions will be “here’s your dose, now move along.” To be fair, it’s the same all over the world.

Dr. Suzanne Humphries is a well-known kidney specialist who spent years of her professional life coming to grips with organized medicine’s ignorance of the fact that vaccines may cause rather than cure disease. She found that high numbers of polio cases mysteriously went away when polio came to be named other things, like poliomyelitis, transverse myelitis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, enteroviral encephalopathy, traumatic neuritis, and Reye’s syndrome. A similar trick was played when influenza suddenly disappeared between 2020 and 2023 and “covid” took its place. Incidentally, one of the common effects of the covid vaccine was facial paralysis, or Guillain-Barré syndrome. Vaccines contain neurotoxins. Neurotoxins cause paralysis and myriad other problems. When it comes to Gaza, we might ask: is the confirmed case there actually polio, or is it one of the many distinct diseases under the umbrella of acute flaccid paralysis? Does a vaccine designed for one strain of polio address some, all, or even any of the mimicking diseases? Is there documentation that the confirmed case was actually polio, or do we just have to take Dr. Jafari’s word for it?

According to Dr. Humphries, “no vaccines are safe. Having “efficacy” means an antibody response is generated, not that they keep you from getting sick. There are many other ways to keep children healthy other than injecting them with disease matter, chemicals, animal DNA, animal proteins, detergents and surfactants that inflame and weaken the blood brain barrier, potentially causing inflammation and other problems.” One way would be to stop bombing them.

The Gaza Health Ministry and Hamas are surely busy enough dealing with zionist genocide, but they need to know that in the last few years public health has been revealed as a very effective weapon of war. The US Department of Defense had a leading role in the worldwide biowarfare operation known as “covid 19 countermeasures.” The WHO and the UN were very much involved in this operation. They are not to be trusted. Like the US government, these supposed humanitarian organizations speak from both sides of their mouth – calling for ceasefire while doing nothing to stop the weapons that every day kill more Palestinians. They know that the best way to protect the children of Gaza is to bring good nutrition, clean water, clean air, housing, and an end to the trauma of psychopath Israel’s daily bombing, yet they do nothing meaningful to bring this about. They are not offering aid with their polio vaccines; they are offering more poison.

August 27, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment

US Military Escort for Philippine Ships in South China Sea ‘Reasonable Option’ – Admiral

Sputnik – 27.08.2024

WASHINGTON – The US military said Tuesday that it is “an entirely reasonable option” for it to accompany Philippine vessels during resupply missions in the disputed South China Sea region, US media reported.

“Certainly within the context of consultations, every option between two sovereign nations in terms of our mutual defense — escort of one vessel to the other is an entirely reasonable option within our Mutual Defense Treaty,” Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, said, as quoted by Bloomberg.

Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines Romeo Brawner said his country’s armed forces would escort the ships when they could and “seek other options when we are already constrained from doing it ourselves.” He added that the Philippines also cooperated with countries other than the US.

Their comments followed a collision between Philippine and Chinese ships near the disputed Sabina Shoal on Sunday, amid recurring clashes.

The territorial affiliation of a number of islands and reefs in the South China Sea has been the subject of disputes between China, the Philippines and several other Asia-Pacific countries for decades. Significant oil and gas reserves have been discovered on the continental shelf of those islands, including the Paracel Islands, Thitu Island, Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly Islands, with the Whitson Reef being part.

August 27, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

Do We Finally Have a Peace Ticket?

By Ron Paul | August 26, 2024

Just as the Harris/Walz campaign was looking for a boost from the content-free Democratic National Convention last week, real drama broke out that pulled the country’s attention back toward Republican candidate Donald Trump. Rumors had been swirling for days that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might suspend his independent run for the White House and endorse Donald Trump and on Friday he did just that.

In his powerful speech explaining the decision, RFK, Jr. made it clear that suspending his run was difficult, as was leaving a Democratic Party that has been almost synonymous with the name “Kennedy” for many decades. On both issues RFK, Jr. explained that he was guided by principles and values over party orientation and the fluff that has increasingly come to characterize American electoral politics.

It seems the more “polarized” much of American society becomes over which political party they support, the more the rest of us continue to see less and less difference between the two when it comes to actual policy. Both parties support the warfare/welfare state. Both pursue policies leading to poverty and war instead of peace and prosperity. Both are deluded into believing that the Federal Reserve can effectively manage the economy while we amass unimaginable levels of debt.

Americans are seeking authenticity and politicians who put principles above political parties and that is exactly what RFK, Jr. did last Friday. In his speech at the Trump rally, RFK served up severe criticisms of the Democrats for their embrace of endless war.

He said: “Judging by the bellicose, belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other neocon military adventures. President Trump says he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes President. This alone would justify my support for his campaign.”

It was a well-aimed blow at the Biden/Harris Administration, which pretends to be seeking peace while pouring gasoline on the numerous conflicts overseas.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed in her speech to the DNC that Vice President Harris is “working tirelessly” toward a ceasefire in Gaza literally as the Biden/Harris Administration announced another huge shipment of bombs to be used by the Israeli military to kill more Palestinians.

What can we hope for in RFK, Jr.’s bold move? For one, we should hope that coming out in favor of principles instead of hollow party identification can reduce the power of political parties altogether. Already in the Republican Party we are seeing a “new guard” emerge that is ready to break with the tired neocon stranglehold on the party.

So does RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Trump on principles rather than parties mean that we finally have a “peace ticket” to support? The short answer is “no,” we don’t have a peace ticket. Many of us who hoped that the first Trump presidency would be that peace ticket were disappointed to see the likes of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo litter the Administration. There is always the chance of a repeat of these mistakes. And neither Trump nor RFK seem reliably in favor of an end to the slaughter in Gaza.

So no, this is not a “peace ticket.” But at least with what we have seen this past week with RFK and Trump, we get the feeling that peace is on the menu. It’s a start.

August 27, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | 2 Comments

Democracy kaput: Germans want peace with Russia, but their rulers only answer to Washington and Kiev

By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | August 27, 2024

Since the beginning of the Ukraine Crisis in 2013/14, German governments, first under former chancellor Angela Merkel, then under her pathetic successor Olaf Scholz, have totally failed to help find a solution through compromise. This is no minor matter, and history won’t look kindly on Germany. Representing a traditionally significant if declining and now self-diminishing power in Europe, Berlin could have made a difference – quite conceivably one that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Yet things are what they are. Initially, under the thoroughly opportunistic yet usually intelligent Merkel, this German failure was mostly due to subservience to the US but practiced in Berlin’s then signature style of evasive shiftiness. Yes, Merkel helped Kiev sabotage the 2015 Minsk II agreement, which could have avoided large-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. But she did that on the sly and only admitted it retrospectively, when criticized for having been “soft” on Russia. “No, I wasn’t!” she, in essence retorted, “I did my part and lied like a street grifter!” What can one say? Ideas of personal dignity differ across cultures.

Under her successor, the merely opportunistic Scholz, Berlin’s approaches have reverted to a certain elementary simplicity. The so-called “Zeitenwende” (epochal turn) he announced two years ago with traditional German modesty means that his coalition government has obeyed Washington in an unprecedentedly self-harming manner. Accepting sabotage of vital infrastructure – Nord Stream – and the systematic demolishing of the German economy by America’s beggar-thy-vassal policy, Scholz has grinned submissively, while not just sacrificing national interests but taking a flamethrower to them.

At the same time – and with a certain consistency one may also observe in committed masochists – this government of death wish loyalty has also ruined Germany’s relationship with Russia with Teutonic furor and thoroughness. All to pander to a Ukrainian regime that now stands accused of blowing up Nord Stream. That accusation makes no sense. Kiev loves to do its worst, true. But it could not have done it without the US. And yet the accusation is the new party line handed down via the Wall Street Journal. It serves as yet another test of how much public humiliation Berlin will take. Answer: there’s no limit.

But Berlin is not Germany. A government so bizarrely out of touch with its own country and its interests is unlikely to represent its citizens well. For some of its members that is even a point of pride. Foreign minister and geometry expert Annalena “360 degrees” Baerbock has long declared that she doesn’t care what her voters want but only about what the Zelensky regime demands. Baerbock, then, must have been positively delighted by the results of a recent and solid opinion poll.

Conducted by the topnotch INSA pollster, the new poll proves that many Germans do not see foreign policy – especially with respect to Russia and Ukraine – the way their current, immensely unpopular and massively failing (as even the Economist admits) rulers do. Consider some highlights: Asked if they are in favor or against peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, 68% of respondents were in favor.

And 65% consider it a “good” or “very good” idea to offer Moscow a quid pro quo, in which Russia would agree to a ceasefire and negotiations, while the West would stop supplying Ukraine with weapons. It’s another matter that Moscow would be unlikely to accept such a deal; those times are over. But Germans outside the Berlin elite clearly prefer winding down the war in lieu of the forever-war scenario that NATO and EU officially promote.

A clear plurality of respondents, 46%, believe that their government has failed to engage in enough diplomacy to protect Germany from the risk of war. Only 26% feel that Berlin has done enough. Yet there is no duty more elementary for rulers than doing everything possible to protect citizens from the threat of war. They cannot always succeed. But those widely seen as not having tried hard enough lose their legitimacy. That much we have known, at the latest since English political philosopher and arch-realist Thomas Hobbes published his “Leviathan” in the seventeenth century.

Legitimacy may sound abstract. Let’s talk about elections then, especially as three important regional elections are coming up. In the länder (states) of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg, all in Germany’s East, the Berlin coalition parties are staring at serious, even devastating losses to be inflicted by two surging newcomers, the very rightwing AfD and the leftwing yet culturally conservative BSW, named after its leader Sarah Wagenknecht.

Could the decline of the coalition parties have something to do with their resolute detachment from many voters’ wishes and fears over foreign policy? Absolutely. Asked in the INSA poll if a party’s demanding or failing to demand peace negotiations for the Russia-Ukraine War is a decisive factor in casting their vote, 43% of respondents answered in the affirmative. The same share said “no.” But leaving almost half the electorate with a strong sense that you don’t care about what they care about – especially in matters of life and death, i.e. war and peace – is never a winning strategy.

It is true that the question focused specifically on an election at the federal level; that is, for Germany as a whole. Regional politics, you might be tempted to think, has different priorities. You’d be so wrong, though. For one thing, Germans love to use their many regional elections as a way to punish the federal government. Voters do not make a neat separation between voting locally and dishing out the pain centrally. On the contrary.

Second, the results of regional elections, therefore, constantly affect Berlin politics, at this point right into the sick heart of a coalition that is terminal already. Third, regional elections in what used to be East Germany before the West German takeover in 1990 are even more neuralgic, because as a rule, voters there tend to be especially skeptical about Berlin’s by now abject subservience to the US and self-defeating if neo-traditional Russophobia.

Germany’s current mainstream media, think tanks, and academic cadres – such as conformist historians Jan Behrends and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk – love to caricature, belittle, and patronize those Germans in the East of the country as in essence backward and brainwashed by Russians. (By the way, if you think that sounds weirdly familiar, that’s how Ukraine got its local civil war going in 2014.) Yet the Soviets/Russians haven’t had a say in eastern Germany for over a third of a century now. While Washington, of course, has maintained its propaganda grip. Maybe the proud domestic kulturträger (culture bearers) of NATO “value” Germany, and who love to look down on their eastern compatriots, should face their own lack of intellectual, political, and ethical independence instead. Where the fear of freedom cripples thought (while boosting careers), a little Kantian reliance on one’s own judgment might help.

In any case, belittling Germans in the East will make them only more determined, and rightly so, to vote their probably freer minds. And what freer minds in Germany see is a government that serves not their country but the US and Ukraine. That is a recipe for richly deserved defeat.

Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.

August 27, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Establishment Voices Attack Telegram Over Free Speech Protections in Wake of Founder’s Arrest

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 27, 2024

Legacy media and some establishment figures are busy justifying the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, attacking the platform, but also making not-so-veiled threats aimed at other platform owners.

Ukrainian-born former member of the US National Security Council Alexander Vindman, who played a key role in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, took to X (calling it “Twitter”) – to warn the social site and its owner Elon Musk that there could be “broader implications” in the context of the Durov arrest.

To Musk specifically, Vindman’s extraordinary message, which reads very much like a threat, is that he “should be worried.” As ever, the accusation is that X is allowing “misinformation” – that is, not censoring enough. And the implication is that unless that happens, there could be more arrests.

In one post Vindman went through the Democrat keywords (mentioning “MAGA tech bros,” “weirdos,” referring to Trump as “sexual predator”) and expressed admiration for the EU’s way of “enforcing content moderation” – ostensibly, as opposed to his adoptive country.

Former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt was also on X to reiterate how EU elites see, and treat the issue of free speech while throwing around dramatically-worded accusations: “Telegram sits at the center of global cybercrime… Free speech is not without responsibilities!”

It follows that other platform owners could face a situation similar to Durov’s.

Officials who no longer hold formal office often serve to express some extreme points of view that those in government would rather not say publicly, and other handy mouthpieces are always legacy media outlets.

Thus the Guardian sees Telegram as a platform for “information and disinformation” about the war in Ukraine, but then goes on to brand it as the favorite app of “racists, violent extremists, antisemites” – this is the Guardian giving life to claims made by a pro-censorship group.

Europeans and the war again, and the Washington Post decided to disseminate the accusation originating from a senior EU security official that Telegram is “a primary platform for Russia to disseminate disinformation in Europe and Ukraine.”

According to CBS, the same is true of another war: “Encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp have been a huge source of misinformation and disinformation in the Israel-Hamas war. Misinformation experts say it’s because they are difficult to moderate.”

And the New York Times decided to hand-pick several of the worst examples among the hundreds of millions of Telegram users, to vilify apps in general and argue in favor of censorship.

August 27, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 5 Comments

Telegram Founder’s Detention Shows ‘Dangerous Trend’ of Online Surveillance

By John Miles – Sputnik – 27.08.2024

Western governments are increasingly seeking to deepen their control of online platforms while looking to discredit those like TikTok and Telegram which they perceive to be beyond their control.

The mass adoption of the Internet has widely been seen as a positive phenomenon in encouraging greater openness and accountability in society.

Polling by Pew Research Center in 2022 demonstrates the largely helpful role citizens around the world attribute to the technology, with majorities of people in most countries approving of its impact. Citizens of Central and Eastern European countries like Poland and Hungary are especially approving of social media’s influence on democracy, with respondents claiming it helps them stay informed about world and local events.

The United States, however, is a notable outlier in the research firm’s survey, with 64% of Americans saying social media has had a mostly negative effect on democracy and 79% saying it has created greater political division.

The finding comes as the role of social media and the Internet has increasingly been vilified in US society, with a panic over the alleged deleterious effect of online disinformation in politics. The height of the Russiagate conspiracy theory during the presidency of Donald Trump represented perhaps the high-water mark for the trend, but Western lawmakers continue to stoke concern over online content to justify government intervention and even outright bans on some platforms.

This weekend’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, then, can be seen as the latest development in the trend after Durov provoked the ire of Western officials earlier this year by revealing the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s attempts to install a backdoor in the popular encrypted messaging application.

“This attempt to break down communications and free speech around the world, I think, is a dangerous trend,” warned host Steve Gill on Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program Monday. “We just saw the CEO of Rumble… fled to avoid prosecution on whatever trumped up charges they may come after him. So this is a big issue. It is a big story. And I’ve been interested that the US media isn’t paying much attention to it. They should be.”

“It’s notable that, of course, Durov was arrested on allegations and is still being held, though he hasn’t been convicted for any crimes,” noted independent journalist John Jackman.

“The investigation has alleged, essentially, that the messaging platform Telegram has been used for fraud, drug trafficking, money laundering, and a coterie of other offenses. Now, what’s interesting about this is basically what the French authorities are saying is that Durov himself is responsible for any abuse that happens on that platform.”

Western authorities have long resented Telegram, which is resistant to the kind of surveillance and content moderation imposed on other online platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or X. Telegram’s relative freedom allows dissidents to thrive and users to share information from alternative perspectives, but authorities have accused the platform of being used to facilitate myriad crimes and abuses.

Recent years have seen Western governments take increasing steps to influence the flow of information online through the implementation of moderation regimes and, more recently, the banning of TikTok. Figures such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and X CEO Elon Musk have become more or less amenable to authorities’ attempts to exert control over their platforms, but Jackman argued that Durov has continued to chart his own course.

“Is Elon in trouble?” Jackman asked. “Well the answer is, if he stays on the right side of US foreign policy then he should be fine and continues to advocate for things like overthrowing the government of Venezuela, staying on the right side of the conflict in Ukraine, not cozying up to Russia too much, and so on. And then, of course, with Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, there’s absolutely no issue.

“One of the striking aspects of Durov’s arrest is that the French authorities actually waited until he landed to even file a warrant,” Jackman said, noting that French officials did not make the Telegram founder aware that he was wanted until he was already en route to France. “He had absolutely no indication that anything was coming. This was actually the same thing that happened with [Venezuelan businessman] Alex Saab, and it’s clear that France wanted to get their man and ensure that there was absolutely no chance of him evading the dragnet.”

Jackman called the tactic “draconian” and lamented Western governments’ attempts to repress their own citizens.

“What [censorship] means is that you’re weak, basically,” he claimed. “When you have to censor speech, when you have to be able to have the power to limit what people can say, then that means that you’re operating in a world where you’re scared of the facts, where you’re scared of truth.”

“We’ve seen this not only in contemporary and modern times, but we’ve also seen this throughout history: when great governments, empires, or nations start to lose their ability to actually govern effectively… you see these crackdowns on speech to start to try to limit the fact that the people can point out that the emperor has no clothes,” he continued. “And I think that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”

“The reason why they’re arresting people like Durov and not Elon Musk is fundamentally because the tentacles of law enforcement and intelligence agencies specifically have not, are not able to seep their way into applications like Telegram the way they are X or the Meta platforms. And so I think this is more of an issue about controlling the broader narrative rather than it is pursuing any specific types of criminal activity.”

August 27, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Durov arrest shows ‘upside-down’ West – Serbian leader

RT | August 26, 2024

Charges against Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France show that the West has abandoned the values it championed just a few years ago, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has said.

The 39-year-old Russian was detained by French authorities on Saturday, after arriving in Paris from Azerbaijan by private jet. Durov also has the passports of France, the UAE and St. Kitts and Nevis.

Speaking on a newscast on Monday evening, Vucic said that Durov’s case was “interesting” and compared him to the persecution of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

“Back in 2018, when Russia put some mild legal pressure on him, some 26 groups from the West signed a petition to the Russian state to stop violating his freedom. Fast forward five or six years, and it’s perfectly normal [for them] to have him arrested and want to shut down Telegram in the West,” Vucic said.

“Everything has gone topsy-turvy, reality itself has been changed to fit their interests.”

France on Monday revealed the laundry list of preliminary charges against Durov, accusing the Telegram mogul of “facilitating” alleged illegal activities on his platform – ranging from drug dealing and money laundering to child pornography – by refusing to cooperate with French investigators going after an unnamed third party.

President Emmanuel Macron has defended the arrest, insisting that charges against Durov were “in no way a political decision.”

X owner Elon Musk, American journalist Tucker Carlson and Silicon Valley investor David Sacks have denounced Durov’s arrest as an attack on the freedom of speech.

Snowden, a whistleblower who revealed the extent of NSA spying on Americans and foreign leaders back in 2012, has accused France of holding Durov “hostage” in order to access private communications on Telegram.

Vucic brought up Durov’s situation in the context of the US and the EU criticizing Serbia for allegedly persecuting political opposition. According to the Serbian president, the EU routinely beats up and arrests protesters by the hundreds, while Belgrade is far more tolerant of outright riots.

“It’s all upside-down!” Vucic said. “When you allow the greatest of liberties, you’re a dictator. The fewer freedoms exist, the more they speak about them.”

August 27, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | 2 Comments