Telegram founder: Apple, Google more dangerous than gov'ts; Jan 6 data demands; company has no ties to Russian gov't

RT
Wed, 17 Apr 2024 06:35 UTC

© Instagram/Durov

Pavel Durov has slammed the tech giants for their attempts to curtail freedom of speech

Apple and Google "could, basically, censor whatever you can read, access on your smartphone," Pavel Durov, the co-founder of the popular messaging app Telegram has told Tucker Carlson in an interview; he lamented that the pressure coming from the tech giants is stronger than that exerted by governments.

The entrepreneur has also said he received warnings from both the Democratic and Republican parties after the January 2021 riots in the US Capitol.

The rare discussion took place at the Russian-born IT entrepreneur's office in Dubai, and was released on Wednesday. Carlson asked Durov to give an example of a request to build backdoors into Telegram that crossed into censorship, and could be considered spying, or violating people's privacy. The messaging app claims to have over 900 million active users.

"There was a funny story related to your home country," the tech entrepreneur replied. "After the events of January 6, we received a letter from, I believe, a congressman from the Democratic side, and they requested that we share all the data that we have in relation to what they called 'that uprising."

On January 6, 2021, a mob loyal to then-US President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol and forced lawmakers into hiding in an attempt to prevent Congress from formalizing Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election.

Comment: That's not quite what happened: America just experienced a coup, but it wasn't by Trump

Durov said his team checked the letter and it "seemed very serious," essentially saying: "if you fail to comply with this request, you will be in violation with the US Constitution."

"Two weeks after that letter, we got another letter, a new letter, from the Republican side of the Congress, and there we read that, if we give out any data [to the Democrats], it would be in violation of the US Constitution.

So we got two letters that said: whatever we do, we would be violating the US Constitution."

However, the most pressure on Telegram, according to Durov, comes from tech giants Apple and Google, Durov stressed.

"I would say that the largest pressure is not coming from governments. It is coming from Apple and Google. When it comes to the freedom of speech, those two platforms could, basically, censor whatever you can read, access on your smartphone," he said. "They make very clear that if we fail to comply with their guidelines, as they call it, Telegram could be removed from the [app] stores."

Durov dismissed any suggestion of links between Telegram and the Russian government, suggesting that competitors could be stirring up such rumours to discredit the company.

Comment: As the Twitter/X files revealed, Big Tech is riddled with government agents, and both are largely working together towards the same agenda. One outlier appears to be X/Twitter, since Musk's takeover, because it has largely managed to defy government pressure; Telegram may be another:

• Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary
• Musk lifts restrictions on X accounts in Brazil despite country's 'fake news' court orders

Some relevant snippets from Wiki on Durov:

In February 2023, Arabian Business named him the most powerful entrepreneur in Dubai.^[8]

For some years after his dismissal as CEO of VK in 2014,^[9] the Durov brothers travelled the world in self-imposed exile^[10] as citizens of Saint Kitts and Nevis.^[11]

In 2017, Pavel joined the World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leaders as a representative of Finland.^[12][13] Durov was naturalized as French in August 2021 and now has European Union citizenship.^[2]

On 16 April 2014, Durov publicly refused to hand over the personal data of Ukrainian protesters to Russia's security agencies and to block Alexei Navalny's page on VK.^[9] Instead, he posted the relevant orders on his own VK page,^[30][31] claiming that the requests were unlawful.

Upon leaving Russia, he obtained Saint Kitts and Nevis citizenship by donating $250,000 to the country's Sugar Industry Diversification Foundation and secured $300 million in cash within Swiss banks. This allowed him to focus on creating his next company, Telegram, focused on an encrypted messaging service of the same name. Telegram was headquartered in Berlin and later moved to Dubai.^[11]

Durov is a self-described libertarian, teetotaler, and vegetarian.^{[43][44][45][46][47]} Durov claims to have an ascetic lifestyle, and promotes freedom from personal possessions.^[48][49][50] For his twenty-seventh birthday in 2011, he donated a million dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation,^[51] the founder and honorary chairman of which is fellow libertarian Jimmy Wales.^[52] In 2012, he published manifestos described by commentators as libertarian detailing his ideas on improving Russia.^[53]