Pavel Durov denounces the request for censorship arrived from the French secret services. Information on the net is increasingly controlled, here are the reasons.
While in Romania they were about to close the polling stations for the presidential elections, Pavel Durovfounder and owner of Telegrama well -known online messaging platform, he announced on X that he had refused to condesce on the requests of the French government so that his platform obscures the unwanted items for Europe.
In a subsequent post, Durov explained in detail the requests of the French government: «This spring, at the Salon des Batailles of the Hôtel de Crillon, Nicolas Lernerhead of French intelligence, He asked me to ban the conservative voices in Romania before the elections. I refused. We have not blocked the demonstrators in Russia, Belarus or Iran. We will not start doing it in Europe».
It is not the first time that Durov has conflicting relations with the French authorities. In August last year, the CEO of Telegram he had been arrested At Le Bourget airport, near Paris. The accusations moved by twelve accusation, linked to criminal activities, which, which, called the French authorities, would be facilitated by Telegram due to the low applied checks.
The judicial affair of Durov, combined with his recent and serious accusations against the French authorities, who would have asked the same to arbitrarily censor uncomfortable voices without any type of valid reason, once again show the very delicate historical situation in which we live. At the “libertarian” explosion of the first Internet are followed by increasingly fine and invisible control and censorship tools.
To put it in the words of Durov, who fled Russia in 2014 precisely for refusing to help the government censor the dissidents, “We cannot “defend democracy” destroying it. You cannot “fight electoral interference” by interfering with the elections. Either you have freedom of speech and free elections, or you don’t have». The border between privacy and national security is increasingly nuanced, while the increasingly complex IT technology) computer systems (and more generally.
Heard by Panorama, Alessandro Curionifounder of “Di.Gi Academy” and expert of Information Security And Cybersecurityhelped us to better understand the complex relationship between freedom and censorship in the world of social information: «Let’s say that a certain type of censorship is implicit in most of the systems and services of the web. With this I mean that Google and all social networks, for example, tend to offer us content that they are “suitable” and in line with our interests and opinions. A situation that ends up excluding a huge amount of information from our knowledge ».
The famous “Algorithm”, present on various social networks and search engines, will in fact try to show content similar to those already viewed by us, with the strong risk of creating an “information bubble” within which each of us views only information and products congenial to him.
«To this that we could define self -censorship, the one carried out by the operators of the web, for regulatory or specific interest constraints. Then there is a third level represented by power structures, starting from the states, which intervene, as in the case of the French authorities with Durov and Telegram, according to national and strategic interests. Censorship has always tried to guide consent, what has changed in the information society is the staircase on which this happens, which has become global».
We cannot understand the obsession of governments for cybersicacy without having a fact in mind: «States have always had control of all revolutionary technologies. Rail transport and plane are born under the state aegis, as well as electrification, telecommunications and nuclear power. On the contrary, the information technologies were born in the private individual and they grew up there, moreover, Their global nature has undermined the very foundation of national sovereignty, or the concept of territoriality».
It is also with this key to reading that it can be better understood “the obsession” of the States for the control of online traffic. “Thanks to the ascent of the main IT operators to a role that is no longer that of simple companies, governments have understood that national security could not ignore a relationship with these new actors”, the relationship can also be conflicting, as in the case of the story linked to Telegram.
“This necessity, combined with the ownership of technologies by private companies, has suddenly made that exercise of the power that states have always carried out in an attempt to maintain their grip on the social body are clearly visible. It is one of the implications of what is now defined as the capitalism of surveillance».
Having ascertained the great power derived from the control of the modern means of communication of the online world, all that remains is to dissolve a doubt: online information (whether on social networks, web sites or messaging apps) is today the most powerful means of communication available, who controls information and “narration” controls the world?
Curioni on this is clear: “I would say that those who control the information creates the narrativeso if we want it is an even more radical situation. Information for itself is not narration. The latter requires a rhythm, a scanning over time, a starting point and one of arrival. So they work at a very deep level on people and, at least from a certain point of view, those who create the narrative actually controls at least a part of the world, usually what interests them ».
The consequence is obvious: «We live in a world in which among the many new forms of emerging conflict (cyber, regulations, hybrids) is also manifesting the “Narrative war”, who worthily happens to the well -known “information war”, in which history and stories do not take place, but are produced on the one hand and then be distorted on the other».
