The French arrest and detention of Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov on poorly specified charges related to failures of content moderation and compliance with law enforcement is an outrage—and a reminder that, at least on the surface, Europe and the United States have fundamentally different approaches to unregulated speech that go back centuries. Recall that John Milton's world-changing defense of an unlicensed press, Areopagitica, pointedly excluded Catholics while his former Cambridge classmate Roger Williams was living in what would become Rhode Island and defending "soul liberty" for all people, "paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian." Bringing charges against, say, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk for failure to moderate content? Maybe. But actually putting them in jail, however momentarily, seems unthinkable.
But Durov's arrest should also serve as a reminder even to Americans who have yet to jettison governance models that seek to command and control speech. Governments and, in different and usually less effective and invasive ways, corporations and religions are still fighting a battle to control speech, freedom, and innovation despite no possible ultimate victory. If it's not the clear collusion and coercion exposed in the Twitter and Facebook files and the Backpage online advertising case, it's net neutrality and age verification to keep kids safe. Or attacking anonymous speech or false speech or Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act for letting too many people talk about too much stuff. Or it's about minimizing the reach of wholly invented categories of speech like misinformation and disinformation. When he first ran for president in 2016, Donald Trump wouldn't stop talking about how he wanted "to open up" our country's libel laws, the better to sue his critics. Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice president and a former social studies teacher for crying out loud, wrongly believes that "there's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy."
