‘Not Just A Platform’: My Latest Byline Report Asks if Tech Tycoons Are Finally Facing the Music
‘Not Just A Platform’: My Latest Byline Report Asks if Tech Tycoons Are Finally Facing the Music
Today’s report in Byline Supplement shows how France, Brazil, and the EU are taking tough action against tech tycoons, who use their platforms to launch weapons of mass democratic destruction
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I had just dashed off my investigation into the Pavel Durov arrest in France, when news broke that Brazil was about to shutter Twitter. Since these platforms are used to launch weapons of mass democratic destruction, it’s about time tech tycoons are held to the fire.
Here is my report from today:
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Below is an excerpt.
Not Just A Platform: Are Tech Tycoons Facing the Music?
After a Brazilian court orders a suspension of X, and the arrest of Telegram's Pavel Durov, Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on how global pressures on tech titans may signal a moment to press 'reset'.
The year is 2024, and humanity is sick. Billionaires who own social media platforms have encouraged a steady drip of high-level toxins into the minds of their users. Hiding behind the antiquated political cloak of ‘libertarianism’, these shadily funded tech tycoons are generals in an information war marching the world toward authoritarianism.
It’s no coincidence that their rise to absolute power occurred in the same era as the global decline of democratic rule.
In the West, we have given hostile nations who fund these platforms steady access to the minds of our citizens. They’ve created foot soldiers of our young men, many radicalized away from decency and empathy and into the arms of “influencers” like Andrew Tate, who was just arrested again for trafficking minors and sex with a minor.
And with every new violent massacre at the hands of another digitally radicalized user, the tech tycoons scream ‘free speech’ as if that absolves them of any blood on their hands.
But with the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in Paris last Saturday the cult of the genius tech bro may be losing some of its absolute power. The arrest of the Russian-born billionaire is a reminder that Telegram is not just a platform, but according to the indictment, has been used for trafficking such crimes such as child sexual assault material, money laundering, arms and drug trafficking, fraud, and failing to cooperate with law enforcement.
Hazardous to Global Health
Also the founder of the Russian propaganda outlet Vkontakte, Durov said he’s fathered 100 children, and although he’s been painted as a folk hero who fled Russia rather than turn over user data, his dozens of trips back to his home country suggest maskirovka, the Russian art of concealment and disguise. Durov, now a French-Emirati citizen who was released on five million dollars bail and barred from leaving France, maintains he has ‘nothing to hide’ but French authorities charged him on Wednesday with complicity in running a digital platform enabling criminal transactions. If convicted, Durov could face up to ten years in prison.
Vienna-based Disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler told Byline Supplement that Telegram has been increasingly hazardous to global health.
“Telegram has played a significant role in supporting anti-government opposition within authoritarian regimes, such as in Belarus four years ago, while simultaneously becoming one of the main distribution channels for propaganda and disinformation from these same regimes and extremist actors, including conspiracy theorists and even terrorist groups,” said Pichler.
He pointed to former Russian puppet president Dmitry Medvedev’s channel as just one example.
“On his Telegram channel, he advocates for Russia to support Kremlin-friendly parties on both the right and the left, posts maps that depict all of Ukraine as part of Russia, and has called the Olympic Games in France ‘disgusting’ and a ‘disgrace’,” said Pichler, who also noted that Russian propagandists on Telegram have already started painting Durov as an “Assange-like figure”.
He added that “pro-Russian Telegram channels function as a kind of ‘press agency,’ providing fabricated content to ‘alternative media’ and anti-Western outlets worldwide”.
But for decades, tech executives have skated, and part of this lack of accountability and personal liability for their products is that laws and regulations have not moved at the speed of technology.
In addition, whenever the crimes committed on these platforms have made front page news, a chorus of billionaires, digital influencers and sketchy journalists sound the “free speech” prebuttal.
Among the loudest: Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson, and even such pro-Kremlin politicians as Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia congressperson who rode the QAnon Cult to power.
“France Doesn’t Fuck Around”
The subject of the podcast American Psyop Wes Clark Jr told Byline Supplement: “It’s worth noting which online influencers and journalists rush to Durov's defense because Kremlin mouthpieces and useful idiots from across the ideological spectrum will be put to work trying to convince you that these criminals have done nothing wrong,”
But he says this arrest is a “very big deal”.
“If I were a billionaire owner of a large social media company used as a channel to commit crimes internationally, I'd probably be squawking about free speech and avoiding travel to Paris right now. France doesn't fuck around.”
Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in a statement that Durov is required to check in at a police station twice a week.
Along with the French charges, the EU is also investigating Telegram. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), Telegram was supposed to provide updated monthly user numbers but did not, and failure to turn over accurate new data puts Telegram in breach of the DSA.
The EU’s tech regulations, combined with the French arresting Durov, both signal that tech bros may be finally facing the music…
As we reported in the third article in our Unmusked series, the European Commission has already opened an investigation into X…
Brazil is going even further. On Friday, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered the "immediate suspension" of X in Brazil, after a court-imposed deadline expired for the company to identify a legal representative in Brazil and pay $3.8 million in fines…
It does not appear the tech bros can meme their way out of the increasingly sharp global moves to hold them account.
The Tech Arms Race Between X and Telegram
The tech arms race has been compared to the nuclear arms race and in many ways, it’s been more destructive. While we live under the cloud of nuclear blackmail, the actual digital harms to humanity are ongoing.
“Telegram is the weapon delivery system that hides its purpose by maintaining a veneer of usefulness as a messaging platform,” Silicon Valley technologist High Fidelity told Byline Supplement. “Dismantling the weapons’ delivery systems is the first step in overcoming our adversary in psychological warfare.”
High Fidelity and extremist researcher and reporter Jim Stewartson are my podcast partners on RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation, where we’ve been sounding the alarm for three years on how social media platforms are utilized as launching pads for weapons of mass destruction in hybrid warfare.
Among the first steps to stop further destruction: international cooperation on addressing the severity of the social media problem. And as Stewartson said, let’s begin with busting the tech bro myths.
“Durov claims to be fleeing the Russian Government, but that’s a lie,” Stewartson told Byline Supplement. “He did a deal with the Russian government, which gave them access to his platform. Telegram was just kind of a weirdish international version of Twitter, until a very important moment, and that moment was January 8 2021. That was when Facebook and Twitter simultaneously got rid of all of QAnon after the J6 Insurrection….The entire QAnon community said, ‘Where are we gonna go’? And Telegram was what was left….
“So QAnon people traveled right into a pit of Nazis and foreign intelligence services. Millions of people flooded into Telegram — no censorship, no moderators — a platform that let them do their most extreme rhetoric. I have 600 Telegram channels [a broadcasting tool], and I can literally type into my channels and understand almost immediately what the Russian government is up to, first of all, and how those narratives are being spread across the entire international landscape. So in America, Telegram is just a cult indoctrination system.”
He said the system’s life blood is sociopathy.
“It is the erasure of not only logic and rationality, but critically, of empathy,” Stewartson said. “There is no caring about human beings anywhere, and it should be burnt in a fire. I know that there are people who use it internationally, and I'm not saying everybody on Telegram is terrible, but right now in America, arguably even more than Fox News, Telegram is the most potent propaganda and mental destruction engine on the planet.”
Stewartson added that Musk’s invitation to re-platform formerly banned accounts run by neo-Nazis on X/Twitter, was in part to compete with Telegram…
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
That inside joke for tech support is a metaphor for what the world needs now: a healthy reset…
“Tech billionaires are at war with us,” High Fidelity told Byline Supplement. “Their companies need to be put under responsible new ownership, and the former owners need to be prosecuted for conspiring with foreign governments to interfere in world elections and for enabling criminal acts.”
And there’s some kind of poetic justice that in this new kind of war, the Great Information War, France has made the biggest battle move so far.
At the Byline Festival in July, I met a man from France who told me the reason there are so many young men radicalized toward the extreme right in France is because the country does a poor job of teaching the history of World War II.
He said, “It’s our national shame.”
Well, just maybe, France is making up for its government’s role in World War II, how it surrendered to Germany on June 22, 1940, a week after the German army captured Paris unopposed.
By arresting a tech billionaire, the French government has taken a lead in responding to the attacks by foreign adversaries on the West.
Vive la France.
Vive la Resistance!
Feels good, don’t it?
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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