What the arrest of Pavel Durov tells us about freedom of expression in the West

The arrest in France of Pavel Durov, the creator of Telegram — and formerly of VKontakte, known as VK, puts me in the strange situation of joining people like Dmitri Medvedev, Elon Musk or Gonzalo Boye in defending him to the hilt. But as one of my best friends always says, you choose your wars but not your trench mates, so here we go.

Durov has not only created the most successful social network in Russia and one of the few that has managed to resist Facebook, but also, when he lost control of VK in 2014 thanks to a maneuver by the Russian government using Mail.ru, he decided, together with his older brother, Nikolai, self-exiled with no plans to return, to set up Telegram as one of the best tools to resist censorship.

That’s Telegram: a place where anyone can say what they want. It is an instant messaging tool, but by its nature goes beyond interpersonal communication, because you can create forums and simultaneous conversations of thousands of people, which also makes it a powerful communication tool.

Logically, this has made Telegram controversial, because if you offer people the freedom to say what they want, they will do so about things that many find uncomfortable, and that may well be illegal. Many of the conversations on Telegram are, indeed, not only…