Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. It’s tomorrow. I promised that we would talk about telegram and social media regulation in the European space. Well, okay. First, what is telegram? Telegram is basically the Russian equivalent of something like Twitter or Facebook manager. The idea is that you can have a part of your account that is, encrypted due to agree to send messages back and forth that no one else can follow. 

Now, when you have a system like this and you get extremist groups that start posting messages, whether that is a right wing group in the United States or, say, ISIS in the Middle East, governments often lean on institutions like Facebook, like WeChat, and the rest to basically give it up. It’s like, you know, this is an issue of public safety. 

You need to cooperate and share your information with us so we can do normal law enforcement things and prevent terror attacks. Now, all of the platforms in the world cooperate with U.S. authorities on that topic except telegram. Telegram does not participate in any assistance with any Western government whatsoever. And so you can imagine the quality of people who tend to use telegram. 

They’re not the sort of people you’re going to invite to a bar mitzvah. They do, of course, cooperate with Russians, Russian governments in order to keep domestic political opposition in Russia under control. But it was a Russian founded institutions. No big surprise there. Now, the guy who founded this thing, Pavel Durov, left Russia a few years ago because the Russian government was, again, a little bit too hot and heavy with leaning on him personally. 

So he’s operated the place primarily from Dubai, but he also had citizenship in France. Well, the French have been after Dubai for quite some time because remember the type of people who use telegram often are not very savory. So you get a lot of drug runners who use this to send money back and forth. You get a lot of child molesters who use it for child porn. 

So the French have had an open warrant for Pavel Durov for quite some time. And he showed up in France. He’s flew on his personal jet, surrendered to authorities, was arrested on the spot. Now, if you are wanted by someone for trafficking in kiddy porn, you are usually aware that the government is after you. And if you’re someone as wealthy as Durov is billionaire, you’re not going to just accidentally land your plane somewhere where you think you’re going to get arrested. 

So he clearly knew what he was doing going in, and he was released in less than 24 hours on bail. Can’t leave the country. But that suggests to me that a deal was cut between the French and Durov, probably even before he left. And now they’re just working out the fine print of the degree of cooperation. 

Now, a few things to keep in mind about telegram from a technological point of view, it’s nothing special. Facebook and WeChat have significantly better encryption than anything that they have. And so, for example, while telegram has not cooperated with Western institutions, most notably the NSA here in the United States had a field day cracking their encryption to go after ISIS. 

And that’s one of the reasons why, over the last several years, ISIS has done so badly that they thought their encryption, was fool proof. And really, most of their mail is being read. And so if you’re a subversive element anywhere in the United States, Dell mass just keep in mind that the FBI’s probably reading absolutely everything that you put out there. 

Now, back to the telegram. So the question now is, what is the deal? TBD, to be perfectly honest. And I’ve kind of put off doing this video because I, we really wanted to have an answer to that question. But I think the biggest thing to keep in mind is not so much drug runners or child molesters, but it’s the Russian military. 

Because while telegram is hardly a very good platform for security, its lack of difficulty in use has meant that it has become the preferred method of communication for the Russian military within itself. You see, Russian private encryption may not be nearly as well as Western private encryption, but it’s loads better and much more user friendly than Russian government military encryption. 

So the Russians have had a problem in the Ukraine war that when they are doing some spotting for artillery, whoever’s doing the spotting basically has to go into this ancient archaic system to send time into task targets and coordinates and everything. And by the time that information is encrypted, uploaded, del loaded, delivered and then d encrypted, it’s irrelevant. 

And so they’ve just been using telegram to basically text directly to the artillery teams. Well, all that data is on telegram. All of the data for their ship to shore communications, even some air power issues are oh, oh my God, it’s so stupid. Anyway, so if giraffe is really deciding to cut a deal with the French intelligence ministries, well, this isn’t potentially just a breakthrough for enforcement in terms of law enforcement. 

This is potentially an intelligence breakthrough for strategic issues because the Russian military has been using it for almost everything. So we have been seeing Russian military bloggers in a not so small number of Russian government personnel in the foreign and defense ministries, basically losing their crap over the last couple of weeks as they’re trying to figure out what it is the Durov is going to give up publicly. 

Nothing has been said publicly. Telegram is saying this is a free speech issue. We have the right to kitty porn. You can imagine how that well, it’s going over in France. Anyway, we will know before long just how this is going to go because like I said, Taraf is already in France and France. France isn’t like the United States when the French government and especially French Intel personnel want something, they have two ways to do things where they have very little pushback from the civilian authorities. 

Number one, little things like torture in France, if you’re a foreign national, they’re a little bit less chatty about the details. Second, if you’ve ever been to the south of France, it’s beautiful. And there’s lots of villas there that could use an extra Russian billionaire. So whether it Durov is induced to cooperate or is chosen to cooperate, there is a tough road and there is an easy road in front of him. 

And the fact that he went to France willingly suggests that it’s going to be the easy road, and someone is going to be having a great time around me in the not too distant future. And the Russian military is going to lose its primary method of communication, and it’s going to lose all of its archives to French intelligence. 

And the French are very good at using stuff like that. 

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, we’re going to talk about social media, truth, government, Elon Musk, the right to lie, and all that good stuff. The issue of the moment is happening in Brazil, where Elon Musk and Twitter (or X, if you prefer) are in a spat with the legal system, including the government and the Supreme Court in Brazil, over social media postings. The very, very, very short version is that Brazil has laws on the books that prevent you from lying in the public sphere, unlike the United States.

They are trying to enforce those laws against Twitter. Twitter refused, at Musk’s direction, to play ball, so the Brazilian courts shut Twitter down. Elon Musk, being Elon Musk, said, “Well, I’ll just transmit it via Starlink.” So the Brazilian government started the process of shutting Starlink down. Needless to say, once his bluff was called, Musk backed down. The court cases are continuing. Musk has called his friends at the FCC (the Federal Communications Commission here in the United States) to work that angle against the Brazilian government, and that is in play as well. It’s a lot of back and forth, but let’s start with the basics.

This isn’t unique to Twitter. There are numerous social media platforms operating in Brazil. The issues the Brazilian government is concerned with involve calls for the overthrow of the government, outright lies, and calls for violence in schools. Every other media institution in Brazil complied with the government’s orders to take this stuff down.

What Elon Musk is really talking about when he mentions extreme rights to free speech is the ability to say whatever you want, whenever you want, regardless of the consequences. Social media is new, and so is its regulation. Every time the United States has gotten new technology for information transfer, we’ve had to build a legal structure to manage and regulate it.

If you go back to the 1800s, every political party in the United States had its own newspaper. If you think MSNBC and Fox are bad now, it’s nothing compared to what we used to put into print, with everyone just making things up about everybody else. Eventually, that got tamped down, and you had to, you know, tell the truth to some degree.

Then we got the telegraph. Suddenly, you didn’t have to wait for the morning edition—people could just type things out and send them across the country. Once again, lies, lies, lies. We got something called “yellow journalism,” which was partly why the United States got involved in the Spanish-American War.

To move from a wild west of information sharing and fabrication to something more civilized, you need some level of agreement among various factions of society. During Reconstruction and the Roaring ’20s, the United States didn’t have that. But with World War II and the dawn of the Cold War in the 1950s, we got a series of Supreme Court cases and Congressional laws that built the structure of libel and fraud laws we know today.

What we’re struggling with now in the United States is that we have those fraud and libel laws that regulate television, newspapers, and magazines, but they don’t regulate social media. Social media comes under the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which says if you’re a technology platform provider, you’re not legally liable for what anyone posts on it.

We don’t have laws regulating what people post, so anyone can say whatever they want, and it can stay up for as long as they want. If someone regulates it, they’re doing it out of goodwill or because the government said, “Hey, this could kill people.”

The quintessential topic of the day is Donald Trump insisting that the 2020 election was stolen from him. After four years, Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee have yet to produce any evidence that the election was stolen. It’s not that evidence has been presented and found faulty; nothing has been produced at all. If you don’t believe me, go to Chris Krebs. He was in charge of maintaining election integrity under the Trump administration, and he said the 2020 elections were the cleanest in American history. Trump fired him.

Saying the election was stolen is still illegal in the United States. Repeating it as news is still legal because we haven’t built the legal structure to regulate it. At this moment in our country’s history, we’re debating a few things, so the consensus needed for new speech regulations probably won’t happen soon. That moment, however, has come and gone in Brazil.

Brazil had a military dictatorship in the latter half of the last century. Once civilian rule was reestablished, they got a new constitution, a new currency, and peaceful transfers of government. They concluded that outright lies in political discourse were bad for their society, so they regulate them.

The danger, of course, when regulating free speech is that someone must act as the arbiter of truth. Someone has to determine, on a case-by-case basis, what is factually correct and what is a flat-out lie. In Brazil’s case, since the recent issues involve calls for sedition, coups, and murder in schools, it hasn’t been hard for Brazilians to get behind this. These aren’t gray areas in the free speech debate, but you still need an arbiter of truth.

The judge involved in this case has been on the job since the “carwash scandal” years ago, where multiple Brazilian governments have tried to clean up public affairs. While it may be too strong to call this a bipartisan or multiparty effort, it does enjoy support across Brazilian society. Musk maligned this judge personally, but the ruling was appealed, the Supreme Court got involved, and it was a unanimous decision. The executive branch of the Brazilian government supports it too.

It’s hard to see the Brazilians backing down on this. Brazil is an important country in South America. What matters here is that many other countries are struggling with this topic for the same reasons. The European Union is paying close attention to what happens in Brazil because they’ve already built a digital directive. This directive gives the European Commission (their executive branch) the legal authority to create an arbiter of truth, manage social media, punish bad actors, and handle content moderation. They haven’t built that arbiter yet, but they’re watching Brazil to see what works.

It’s probably not going to be Musk and Twitter that decide this case. The first case for whatever this new authority will be is likely to involve a different platform—something called Telegram, which originates from Russia. And we’ll talk about that tomorrow.