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The freedom interlude was a byproduct of the end of the cold war. We lived a rare period of trust between people across the world. Now we need to find a new framework beyond national trust but I don't have ideas.
Durov himself lives in an unfree country
What unfree county is that? He certainly doesn't live in Russia if that is what you are alluding to.
Let's take a second to remember that Pavel Durov is the CEO of a messaging company that doesn't end-to-end encrypt chats by default and does not provide a way to end-to-end encrypt group chats
He covered it in the interview in a quite reasonable way. E2E encryption, especially if forward secrecy is a requirement is incompatible with many important features: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qjPH9njnaVU&t=9583
You probably don't realize it, but multi-device support, group chats of tens of thousands of users, channels with millions of users and comments of said users. Attachments and history and search. And then a whole infrastructure for running bots and processing payments. And proxies to fight blocking attempts. All of these are either highly problematic or computationally intensive and practically infeasible with E2E on.
Otherwise, someone would have taken the opportunity and reimplemented Telegram on top of homomorphic encryption /s.
> We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech. By betraying the legacy of our ancestors....
Pavel Durov's ancestors include a Red Army soldier who helped pave the way for Soviet control of Eastern Europe. While the content of his message about losing privacy has merit, the appeal to "tradition" and "forefathers" seems like he's speaking to a particular kind of audience.
It is weird that all he seems to do is criticize western democracies and push NFTs. Who is hawking NFTs in a year that isn't 2020?
Telegram and Durov have a different idea of NFT than you, I guess.
For them, it's more about enabling micropayments. So far, the only successful micropayments system was advertising, and it's a real shame we couldn't build better.
Reaching the end of the same decade, and sadly share the same opinion, worse seeing the population of my country voting for what we got away from 1974 and what my parents generation had to endure.
Let's take a second to remember that Pavel Durov is the CEO of a messaging company that doesn't end-to-end encrypt chats by default, and does not even offer a way to have end-to-end encrypted groups.
I share Durov’s disappointment about where the internet is heading.
But I think it’s hypocritical to talk about freedom of speech issues in Western Europe while ignoring similar or worse restrictions in China, Russia, or Dubai, where he lives.
It’s similar to Musk’s approach — when Twitter is shut down in Brazil, it’s a freedom of speech violation, but having a Tesla factory in China suddenly makes that problem disappear there.
Hypocrisy is a virtue. It gives you the strength to batter the enemy while remaining untouched yourself.
I view it differently. China and Russia are lost causes and are fundamentally authoritarian. Western democracies or countries that claim to constitutionally protect free speech (like Brazil) can be held to a higher standard. Not doing so leads to them ultimately becoming authoritarian.
Stateless individuals shouldn't lecture us on values.
Well, Russia has basically never had freedom of speech, except for a brief period in the 1990s, so it contributes nothing to his thesis in the tweet that "once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures."
Related: Lex Fridman just dropped a 4 hour podcast with Durov
Two intelligence assets talking to each other. Both have quite similar backgrounds with dubious credentials. A history of lying and obfuscation. I wouldn't trust anything Fridman or Durov say.
you don't have to listen - get google gemini to make a transcript & summarize key points.
Pavel Durov cannot be trusted. He has built his life on lies, created an opaque, highly complex network of companies, and developed a relationship with the Russian regime that is full of inconsistencies, among other things. For starters, he claimed for years that Telegram's headquarters were in Berlin, Germany, when they never were.
He, himself? I agree. He's a snake in the grass. His message is 100% correct though.
PS: He is even lying about his own body.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tjournal_refugees/comments/1k3lc02/...
Lol lets not even talk about his comical toupee.
> and ultimately biological.
Was fully nodding along, and this confused me. What is that supposed to mean?
That’s the thing about dog whistles, they’re full of plausible deniability.
people refuse to acknowledge the truth and instead attack the messenger -- how is that 'elevating' the conversation? it's just pure propaganda.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
There is plenty of evidence -- anyone who saays otherwise tell me and i will provide it unless hn bans me yet again for attempting to spread the truth.
for germany -- look up CJ Hopkins. free speech is a farce in europe and has been for decades.
>The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets.
Except they are not. Googling I came across about five, mostly calling for asylum seekers accommodation to be burned down. Arson was actually disapproved of even before twitter.
Durov's home country is murdering thousands in Ukraine though in the hope they they'll bend the knee to the invaders. I think that sort of stuff is more a threat to freedom.
I agree that we're doomed, but I think the key decision that doomed us was made deep in the NSA in the 1980s, when they decided to bury the idea of Capability Based Security, and just let MS-DOS and Unix take over computing after the rise of the microcomputer. They had discovered and then fixed the problem with ambient authority after it arose during the Viet Nam conflict, giving rise to Multilevel Security.
When the Microcomputers came, and everyone ignored mainframes, they decided to step back, and let everyone have their foolishness. It was far easier for their jobs if the let operating systems that trusted everything take over the market. The Soviets copied our moves, and made themselves vulnerable. They figured they would retain the institutional knowledge and wisdom, keeping their own internal systems secure by design.
But they didn't plan on retirements and changes of administration, and the end of the cold war. Once that shock happened, they didn't reconsider. They didn't reconsider again when the world became networked, and connectivity for almost everything became persistent. There were multiple points at which they could have changed course, quietly pushed systems that were secure by design, but they apparently haven't.
So now we're in a world where you can't trust anything newer than an IBM XT with dual floppy drives. Where firmware can be updated with persistent worms, making it permanently untrustworthy. Into this world, we all carry spying devices in our pockets and purses, that can be repurposed by any intelligence agency, or sufficiently motivated person for that matter, into tools of oppression.
I think that a sufficient shock might pull us back into rationality, and cause us to seek sane computing strategies we can trust, but I don't give that good odds at present, 5% or less.
We don't have privacy, and you'd have to be an old fool to actually speak your mind these days. We're falling right into the thing we feared the most when I was a kid, a repressive Soviet style oligarchy where you can't trust anyone. You especially can't trust any computing devices.
It should be noted that Durov does not criticize Russia, his country of citizenship and the center of much of his userbase.
The Russian internet is far more controlled than the Western internet, with penalties up to and including arrest and death for expressing the wrong views. Russia also is actively invading Europe and sponsoring vast network of troll accounts which poison the discourse on the internet in Western countries.
This does not make his argument incorrect but it is worth keeping the context in mind before getting too cynical about western systems. That cynicism is one the explicit goals of Russian propaganda.
Durov left Russia in 2014 after he refused fo cooperate with the authorities (they asked to hand over personal info about pro-Ukrainian groups on VK), saying:
>Unfortunately, it's impossible to run an online business in this country. I'm afraid there's no way back for me - especially after I publicly refused to cooperate with the authorities.
What I'm seeing here is that for a lot of liberal Russians (including Durov), the West was this ideal, beacon of freedom, and many are disappointed to see it moving in the same direction as Russia. For Russia, it's obvious that free speech doesn't exist there, nothing new to say.
Exactly and what he writes about Germany is wrong:
> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet
No you can criticize all you want. You just can’t insult them. Free speech is different in Germany than in the US. Insulting people isn’t covered by free speech.
Whether or not that is a good thing is up for debate, but Durov’s statement is plain wrong.
Nor does he criticise the UAE where he moved to, where of course he gave up free speech for tax benefits. I don’t blame him of course, I’d be terrified to criticise the government if I lived there too.
> That cynicism is one the explicit goals of Russian propaganda.
I don’t need Russia to tell me to be cynical of the western political situation.
I don't think Russians are the group English speakers get the most propaganda from.
Pavel can't be trusted in any way. Russia is at war with Europe, russians are living in a bloody dictatorship and there is zero freedom of speech in Russia. Yet his tweet is only about western democracies in Europe - exactly what you would expect from a Putin puppet.
i haven't celebrated a birthday in decades. i think prince or the artist formerly known as is right. you were born on a day years ago, that's not the same day as the yearly rotation around the sun even if it matches silly marks on a calender.
I agree with every word Pavel put there - and what is most threatening ... we are about to lose it.
Why?
Normies.
They were 'played' in C19 time - and they will be 'played' next time ... and EVERY next time.
There are just too many IGNORANT people out there that trust TV.
This is Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. And he’s totally correct. The Internet was much better before the 2000s and the social media era. And when the people who remember it aren’t around, those remaining won’t have any idea that they’re missing something.
He’s also totally correct in calling out the obvious lunge towards authoritarianism from European democracies - this must be stopped immediately:
> Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).
> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.
We're also running out of people who know and care that you used to be able to buy straight from a publisher, own, play offline with privacy, and resell games on an open platform without Steam as a DRM/rent-seeking middleman.
Germany has always had strange (bad) laws about insulting people. It's literally nothing to do with the internet. You are betraying your ignorance by saying they "must be stopped"—they've been around since the country was founded.
Yet he is also one of the riders of apocalypse. Techbros who only applied rules that suited them and abused everything else. It's one thing if we had some mythical true freedom fighters, or guys from Signal, against The State, but if it's people like him, Zuckerberg etc. then it gets much harder to defend anything they do. It is important to understand that 'the lunge towards authoritarianism' is directly caused by this.
> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet.
This is not correct as far as I know. If Germany is persecuting someone for something written on the internet, that something is much worse than criticism. Words should still have meaning.
Can we stop conflating free internet and exchange of ideas with stupid closed platforms that steal your data?
You're the billionaire owner of Telegram. If you cared about these things you'd sell and invest in open standards or making our current standards suck less or be easier to use.
Cry me a river.
"Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet
Bull. Shit. If you break the existing laws, by insulting or slandering someone, you might have to face the consequences.
But I guess it is easy to point the finger at Germany and conjure the specter of the fascists if you live in Dubai, come from Russia, and created 2 of the biggest troll-mills ever. Would not want to rattle the cage too much, would we.
"The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets."
Who?? What's he talking about?
Common misunderstandings are that there was no control over the internet and that anonymity was for protecting freedom of expression of the individuals.
The difference is that what once was covert in the West is now out in the open. Anonymity enabled the troll culture, famously exploited by any and all bad faith actors in their favor. Control in terms of surveillance on metadata level is just a manner of having enough endpoints at your disposal for a nation state actor.
It was a nice illusion and the wake up is kind of harsh.