All language subtitles for Pavel Durov Communication Technology and the Struggle for Freedom [English (auto-generated)] [DownloadYoutubeSubtitles.com]

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>> Passengers of the Titanic

actually didn't want to leave the ship

for almost 2 hours

after it hit the iceberg.

People thought that Titanic was

unsinkable.

Lifeboats left half empty.

Only the last half an hour people

started to panic.

But by that time it was already too

late.

Not enough lifeboats.

Nowhere to hide.

Nowhere to run.

I came here today to tell you that we

find ourselves in a similar predicament,

in a similar situation.

Our ship has already hit the iceberg.

We have already started

to sink

without even realizing it.

And I'm talking about the ship of our

personal freedoms.

Personal freedoms have been eroded

everywhere in the world almost without

exception.

I know this from personal experience.

I've been running large social media

platforms for almost 20 years. Actually,

exactly 20 years.

And I witnessed firsthand

which methods governments use to

suppress our freedoms and to take away

our basic rights.

I've seen all the tricks.

The PR tricks, the legal tricks, the

political tricks.

The manipulations, the official excuses.

I've became an expert at this.

And the thing that bothers me most today

is that some of the same tricks that

have been employed

by authoritarian regimes in places like

Russia or China and Iran

are now being also used

in some Western countries.

But maybe I'm exaggerating things,

right? Let's look at the facts.

Thousands of people are getting arrested

every year in the United Kingdom

for social media posts.

You say something politically incorrect

online, you may end up being fined or

spend some time in prison. In Germany,

large the largest country in the

European Union,

people get arrested and persecuted for

insulting politicians online, thousands

of people every year. You call a

politician a bigot or a thief online and

you can serve up to 3 years in prison.

So, now people are afraid to use their

real identities. People stop using their

real names

when they make comments online.

And the European Commission is pushing

for a new measure.

A measure to require that all social

media users

present their IDs

before they can access social media

sites.

Their official justification is child

protection.

They want to ban social media services

for everybody under 16. And for that,

they need people to verify their age

by presenting their ID.

But what will happen if social media

sites are banned for teenagers?

Will it bring harm or good?

Actually, we know the answer to this

question.

Why? Because it has already been tried.

This experiment has already been

conducted. It's It's has been carried

on.

In Russia.

So, Russia banned Telegram, the largest

social media platform at the time,

for all of its citizens

because we refused to comply with their

demands for mass surveillance and

censorship.

However, 95% of Russian teenagers still

use Telegram every month.

How? They use VPNs. They bypass the

entire thing.

And there's very little you can do with

VPNs. Russia is trying very hard. They

have invested billions in trying to

fight VPNs. They're banning hundreds of

VPNs every month

using

IP addresses and traffic patterns. They

even installed surveillance hardware

into every data center of every internet

provider in the country

trying to monitor all the traffic and

trying to prevent people from using

VPNs. And they failed. Despite all this

effort, they failed.

The majority of the population of Russia

still uses Telegram. The majority of the

population of Iran still uses Telegram

as well. Despite the fact that Iran has

been blocking Telegram for all of its

citizens since 2018.

So, we know exactly what happens when

you ban social media for part of your

population. They just switch to VPN.

The problem is once we force teenagers

and children to use VPNs all kind of

nasty, illegal, fringe content

gets unlocked for them.

Certain websites that have been banned

years ago

all of a sudden become available again.

So, the children end up being in a

larger danger

than they're in now.

And you can ask yourself, so if this

policy is destined to fail, you know,

obviously

we see how it played out in other

countries.

Why is the European Commission and the

United Kingdom and Australia and Canada

and some other countries are pushing for

this measure?

Is it incompetence?

Maybe.

But the British government seems to have

given an answer to this question.

Publicly, they promoted the Online

Safety Act as a set of laws to protect

children.

To force

people to verify their age

in order to access social media. They

needed to protect children.

Privately, though, they offered a

different explanation.

In their submission to the High Court of

England published last year, the British

government said that the principal part

of the Online Safety Act had nothing to

do with protecting children. Instead,

they said, and I quote,

the main part of the Online Safety Act

was aimed at capturing large platforms

with significant influence over public

discourse.

Now, let's think about it.

They used protection of children as a

pretext, where in fact in fact, they

wanted

more control over political speech

online.

And this is very sad

because

protecting children is exactly the same

justification that has been used in

countless other cases by authoritarian

regimes

over the course of the last century.

Why? Because once somebody says child

protection, all of a sudden,

it triggers

very ancient, very deep parts of our

brain.

Who would be against protecting

children?

Everybody is scared for the future of

their offspring.

Once somebody says we need to protect

the children, they're in danger,

it completely bypasses logic. It

bypasses debate. It bypasses

rationality.

All of a sudden, are ready to give up

everything.

And authoritarian regimes were able to

smuggle all kinds of repressive

legislation

under the guise of protecting children.

Now, the same justification is being

used by the European Commission

to push for a set of surveillance laws,

the so-called chat control,

the chat control initiative.

For 5 years, the European Commission has

been trying to

force

a new set of laws that would require

every messaging app to implement a

backdoor to their encryption.

So that everything that we share online,

every private message,

every private photo

that we sent

using apps like Telegram or WhatsApp or

any other

would be automatically monitored.

And if the system detects that we are

trying to do something illegal, it

alerts

the authorities.

The justification here, again, is

child protection.

And this has been tried on the European

level and also on the national level.

The French government has been trying to

pass a similar law

that would basically mandate mass

surveillance

on the national level.

The French Senate

has approved this law.

It got stuck on the level of National

Assembly, but the French Senate thought

it was a reasonable

and a good idea to enact

mass surveillance.

So, this shows how dangerous it is and

how close we are

even here

in Europe

to the to

a state where we end up

being monitored.

Now, the French used slightly

different justification. They said, "We

need

to combat crime. We need to do something

about terrorism.

We need to do something about drug

trafficking.

And that's why we need to spy on you.

For your own protection, you have to

give up your essential right to

privacy."

And this again has been tried countless

times

in the history of humanity, where we

or different nations

throughout history have been offered an

exchange.

Give up some of your essential liberty

in exchange for some temporary safety.

And this deal, this offer is always a

scam, and it always turned out to be a

scam.

>> [applause]

>> It was Benjamin Franklin who said,

"Those who are willing to give up

their essential liberty for some

temporary safety deserve neither liberty

nor safety."

>> [applause]

>> And we see that.

We see that in countries faces. Ask

people living in Russia

or living in Iran whether they feel

safer today

than they felt 10-15 years ago.

They definitely lost a lot of their

freedoms in the last decade or two.

Have they gained any safety?

I doubt that.

Once you allow

law enforcement, police have access to

your messages,

you will not prevent crime.

The criminals will be the first to

switch on to other tools,

more secure. They will use VPNs. They

will use private secret apps.

They can even wipe code their own

encrypted messaging app now in the age

of AI.

The criminals will be fine.

It will be the law-abiding citizens who

will be put in danger.

It will be the ordinary people that will

have their privacy taken away from them.

Not the criminals.

Well, how do I know that? Maybe I'm

inventing things.

Again, from my experience in Russia 15

years ago when I was still running VK,

the largest social network in Russia at

the time,

we started to receive weird

data requests from from the Russian

police.

You know, back then VK actually

disclosed in some cases contents of

private messages, unlike Telegram today

which doesn't disclose it ever.

VK back in the day did that, provided

there was an official justification.

And we started to notice something

weird.

Something was off about this data

request coming from the Russian police.

We realized

that the people who were included in

these investigations

had nothing to do with with the crimes

that were described there.

So, we started to investigate the

investigators.

And we came to a conclusion to a

conclusion pretty fast

that the police was corrupt.

They went were trying to access private

messages of innocent people in order

to then blackmail them

and sell their private data to

criminals.

They used it for harassment

and other things.

So, you could say, "Okay,

you had this

um

traumatizing experience in Russia, but

surely nothing of the kind can happen in

the civilized West."

Well, I have bad news for you.

Last year, a French tax official was

caught stealing the financial data

of people

who held large amount of crypto assets

and other wealth.

So, a French tax bureaucrat was selling

personal financial data of French

citizens

to criminals.

Now, as a result of this leak and

countless other leaks from French

government systems,

you have a catastrophic rise in the

number of kidnappings in France.

Just in the first 3 months of 2026, you

have over 40 victims of kidnappings in

France. People getting tortured,

harmed, [snorts]

harassed, humiliated,

all because the government wanted too

much data and failed to protect it.

And now they want more of the data.

The situation is already catastrophic as

it is,

but they don't want to stop there.

They also want to access your personal

messages. They want to access IDs of

everybody who's using social media.

Imagine the damage

it can inflict

if they get what they want.

Now, this is already completely insane

and unbelievable.

But there's a third method, a third

issue,

>> [snorts]

>> a trick that has been used by

authoritarians for decades.

And now it is being increasingly

exported from the East to the West.

I'm talking about selective enforcement

of laws. Now, the way it works is pretty

straightforward.

First,

you need to introduce

a large number of laws.

You need to overburden a certain certain

industry

with

excessive

mutually exclusive contradictory

regulation.

As a result,

you make compliance impossible.

Now you can treat every

entrepreneur, every CEO, every uh

business owner

in this country, in a certain industry,

as a criminal.

But then the government carefully starts

to choose who to persecute.

If the business owner is loyal,

if it complies with immoral,

unlawful demands from the government,

gives certain political favors,

then the law enforcement system and the

judicial system look the other way.

They don't do anything.

But, if the business owner

decides to stand up

for the constitutional rights

of his or her fellow citizens,

if they

refuse to cave in

to political

demands from the authoritarian

government, then

the persecution and the enforcement of

laws comes in full.

And once somebody starts to criticize

the government for doing that,

the

eternal, perennial response is, "We're

just

enforcing the law.

You don't want to live in a country

which is lawless.

We're just enforcing the laws."

I personally experienced that

in my days in Russia.

I had a criminal investigation against

me.

In 2013, I believe I have a criminal

investigation against me in Russia

today.

But, interestingly,

this is something that we see

increasingly in the West as well. And

you can say, "There's no way it can

happen.

It's something from the world of the

barbaric East."

Well, I have bad news.

Elon Musk said that the European

Commission offered him a secret deal

where they demanded that he

conducts

censorship

of certain political narratives on his

platform. And in exchange, the European

Commission promised him not to enforce

certain fines and laws on his company.

Elon Musk said that he refused that

offer.

But, most other platforms accepted it.

Then Elon's company was hit by a

120

million euro fine

from the European Commission

for seemingly unrelated issues,

something that has to deal with

transparency.

Now, we can doubt the words of Elon

Musk. Maybe he was inventing things,

right?

But unfortunately

his words are at least

indirectly confirmed by the results of

the investigation conducted by the US

Congress.

The US Congress published emails between

the European Commission officials and

managers of

large social media platforms during the

pandemic.

These emails included

attempts to pressure

all these networks

to silence political narratives and

accounts

that were inconvenient

for the European Commission at that

time.

So,

you had Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,

YouTube, and others

ban, censor,

down rank,

shadow ban,

demote

accounts and narratives

that spread inconvenient truths or

inconvenient narratives. The official

justification for that

was that the European Commission was

trying to combat misinformation and

conspiracy theories

during the pandemic.

Well, now years after it seems that

many of those so-called conspiracy

theories turned out to be at least

partially true, and in any case were

worthy of a public debate.

Now, everything from the artificial

origins of COVID

to the limited nature of the anti-COVID

measures

to the immense harm done to the young

generation by school closures

all of it once considered

conspiracy theories is now becoming part

of the mainstream

debate and the mainstream view of what

happened during COVID.

So, those narratives were silenced

not because they were untrue.

They were silenced because they were

inconvenient

by those people in power.

And if this is not

political censorship I don't know what

is.

Now, I myself

has been personally

exposed to selective enforcement of laws

also in Europe

not just in Russia.

And I talked about it last year on this

stage

uh

after I was arrested in Paris for

reasons that are still unclear in 2024.

I got offered a secret deal by the head

of the French intelligence

who asked me to silence certain

political voices.

Well, I refused that deal and I'm still

under this investigation and still

facing many years in prison.

But

I don't want to talk about this today.

I want to

conclude

by telling you a related story.

Something that happened during these

days when I

uh

was detained in Paris and I was uh

spending a few days in this uh police

custody, basically a jail cell.

I was interrogated for

almost 3 days

and there was this translator that was

helping us. He was appointed by the

judge.

And after 3 days of translating

during one of this uh

pauses between sessions

the translator was sitting there

seemingly shocked.

Perhaps she was shocked by the selective

and political nature of the charges

brought against me.

But she looked at me, she looked at the

police officers present and she said

"I left the Soviet Union in the '80s

because I wanted to escape an

environment

where my freedoms are limited. I wanted

to escape an environment

where human rights are disrespected.

But now, after witnessing what I've

witnessed

I feel like the Soviet Union

is catching up with me. I feel like I'm

back in the Soviet Union."

In that room in Paris

that woman who escaped

the Soviet Union

felt

she's back in the Soviet Union. And of

course, perhaps she was being over

dramatic. Perhaps she was exaggerating

things. But if we let the current trends

continue

we can end up in a place much worse than

the Soviet Union of the '80s.

You know, when my parents sent each

other letters

or sent telegrams to their relatives in

the Soviet Union of late ages.

Sometimes they expressed hope that the

KGB would not open the letters.

That the KGB would not have enough

resources to read everything that

they have to write.

After all, there was a human limit to

surveillance.

There were only so many KGB officers,

only so many hours in a work day.

Only so many letters they could open.

Now, we don't have this luxury.

In the world of AI, if we give up our

right to privacy,

you can be certain that every message

that you send will be monitored, will be

analyzed.

Every draft, every thought, every idea

will be scored.

Every relationship will be mapped.

The future can become much darker and

more dystopian

than the Soviet Union of the '80s.

So, we don't have this luxury

that the passengers of the Titanic had.

We cannot afford

to have this ship sunk.

See, there is nowhere to escape.

In the past, dissidents from

authoritarian countries

could flee to the West.

But if the current trajectory continues,

in a decade or two from now, they will

have hard time

trying to understand whether they have

already left their repressive homeland

or they're just entering another

open-air prison.

Now,

I hope it will not come to that.

But, we need to realize the gravity of

the situation. We need to start acting.

We don't have a backup plan.

We don't have lifeboats.

There is no second West. There's no

backup civilization.

For decades or centuries, the West has

been

a guiding star for everybody who loved

freedom, and we need to preserve that.

If the ship of Western freedom sinks,

the rest of the world

is likely to follow.

We will lose freedoms everywhere.

So, we cannot let this happen.

We cannot let this ship sink.

The only way forward

is to fix this ship.

Let's do that.

Thank you very much.

>> [applause]