Following the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, questions have arisen as to why Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has not faced similar charges as Meta’s platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, have also been used to spread child sexual abuse material, traffic drugs, and more.
CHILD ABUSE ONLINE.
WhatsApp, the encrypted message bought by Meta for $19 billion in 2014, is the platform most similar to Telegram and has many of the same problems regarding the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and drugs.
Proxy Impact, a firm that guides foundations and other investors, claims that in 2023, 36 million reports of CSAM were reported online, and 85 percent, or 31 million cases, were reported on Meta platforms.
The firm also criticized Meta for implementing encryption across its platforms, not just WhatsApp, saying it could make as many as 70 percent of the cases of CSAM “invisible.”
Meta has allegedly struggled to prevent its platforms from being used by pedophiles, with some systems even promoting them.
Dan Sexton, chief technology officer of the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), stated earlier this month that WhatsApp has ways to detect CSAM but refuses to use them.
He commented following a scandal involving former BBC top anchor Huw Edwards, who had been creating and spreading CSAM in a WhatsApp group.
As recently as 2022, Meta and WhatsApp flatly refused to break their end-to-end encryption as the government argued it was the only way to stop the spread of CSAM.
Telegram has also refused to break its encryption for any government. French prosecutors listed this as one of the charges against Pavel Durov, alongside complicity in various other illegal acts on Telegram.
So the question remains: why is Mark Zuckerberg not facing the same consequences as Pavel Durov?
FRIEND OF THE ESTABLISHMENT.
While both Meta and Telegram have seen their platforms abused by drug traffickers, pedophiles, fraudsters, and more, a shared difference between the two is how they interact with significant governments across the world.
Mark Zuckerberg and Meta actively censored speech during the COVID-19 pandemic, something Zuckerberg has only just admitted and apologized for this week.
Zuckerberg also admitted that Meta had censored the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential campaign and said that following the election, the Biden-Harris regime repeatedly pressured Meta to censor Meta’s platforms.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it… we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” Zuckerberg said.
According to X owner Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, and other social media giants, they agreed to a secret, illegal deal with the European Union to censor their own platforms.
Durov, on the other hand, has repeatedly refused to censor Telegram on behalf of any government, including the United States or France.
During an interview with Tucker Carlson, the 39-year-old Durov explained that FBI agents and others had approached him and had personally refused requests to remove content from Telegram.
“Where we thought it would be crossing the line – it wouldn’t be aligning with our values of freedom of speech and protecting people’s private correspondence – we would ignore,” he said.
