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This is consistent with the findings of Mike Benz, a former State Department official and world authority on the censorship-industrial complex. Benz has reported US government-funded outlets like Radio Free Europe singling out Telegram for attack along a similar timeline (shortly after Durov’s interview with Tucker Carlson four months ago).
Durov’s arrest is without question a significant flashpoint in the critical and disturbing developments at the intersection of online censorship and geopolitics. The arrest not only confirms but also escalates a pattern that we have identified in previous pieces, whereby regimes have transitioned from mere repetitional and deplatforming attacks to the arrest, indictment, and imprisonment of those who engage in or facilitate unapproved speech. While conventional censorship in the form of deplatforming still takes place, Elon Musk’s acquisition and subsequent reorientation of Twitter in a free speech direction has significantly limited the regime’s ability to engage in censorship in the conventional sense that was revealed in the Twitter files.
Indeed, censorship on the level of the US government effectively pressuring platforms like Twitter to censor inconvenient stories (such as the Hunter laptop story) likely reached its high water mark in 2020. In the aftermath of Elon’s acquisition of Twitter and a broader tech alignment toward MAGA (with Microsoft as a conspicuous pro-Kamala holdout), even Mark Zuckerberg has recently publicly praised Trump and openly acknowledged Facebook’s role in censorship in 2020 at the behest of the national security state. Even some of the major university centers that had been dedicated to promoting the “disinformation” pretext for online censorship have gone defunct, such as Stanford University’s disgraced censorship think tank, the Stanford Internet Observatory. Such institutions were major incubators of the kind of “disinformation”-based censorship that peaked so aggressively in 2020.
Just because conventional “deplatforming”-style censorship peaked in 2020 does not mean the regime has given up. Not by a long shot. What it means is that the regime has to adapt and change its approach, and as we have mentioned above and elsewhere, this involves not just censoring and attacking, but indicting, arresting and imprisoning.
And even for those who are in the political space, there is another thing to consider: if doxxing and socially-driven “cancellation” are receding as viable regime weapons for ideological control, there are other weapons there to replace them.
Cancellation is a powerful tool of soft social control. It’s the power to get dozens, if not hundreds, of people and organizations to collude to isolate a person and demolish their life without having to exercise a single law or employ the state’s monopoly on organized violence. But never forget: The regime still has those tools. So as the soft tool of doxxing wanes, expect the regime to increase its use of more direct methods of ideological control.
But Douglass Mackey is probably the best example of all. Unlike Jones or Trump, he was an anon when he committed his “offenses.” He was targeted not for public political activity but for private actions. And yet, nevertheless, the Department of Justice went through the effort of warping a 150-year-old law, the Ku Klux Klan Act, so that it could justify trying to throw Mackey in prison for posting an anti-Hillary Clinton meme.
Expect the Mackey model to be employed more and more often, on flimsier and flimsier pretexts. Because when a regime can’t use shame to destroy its foes, there is always force.
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