It looks like the streaming giant is now siding with the big names of Big Tech, Google, Amazon, Meta who have all taken a side in the Middle East war and who have much to account for, according to a report by Access Now: 

Meta has been accused of censoring pro-Palestinian voices on all its platforms and possibly sharing the Whatsapp data of Palestinians with Israel. Meta has publicly denied handing over people’s data to the Israeli government, but as this newsletter notes, there is still no evidence to show that it has taken any concrete action to protect people’s privacy or to ensure that its metadata is not exploited to train and run dystopian AI systems. 

Google, under its Project Nimbus, provides Israel with advanced AI capabilities including facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and sentiment analysis to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and text, which has long been used for the surveillance of Palestinians by the IDF. Despite reports of Israel using AI-powered programs like Where’s Daddy and Lavender to isolate and destroy non-military targets, Google signed a new contract with Israel’s defense ministry in 2024 — when Google’s workers revolted over this new contract, the company fired 50 of its own employees. In a statement to Time, Google said “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education. Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” 
Amazon, meanwhile, enables the Israeli army to store intelligence information collected via the mass surveillance of Gaza’s population on servers managed by Amazon’s AWS. Israeli military also confirmed to +972 that on some occasions, AWS services helped the IDF confirm airstrike targets. Despite this, AWS still claims to be committed to its cause of building “responsible AI.”

In a recent essay for Coda, Judy Estrin, CEO of JLABS, LLC quoted the first law of technology: it’s neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. It’s unsurprising  that in a year of horrors, Big Tech has amplified the human capacity for cruelty and war, from assisting the spread of garden variety disinformation to AI-powered weapons that methodically pick non-military targets to destroy. The steady march to this dystopian moment has come about through the slow stripping away of human rights via old-fashioned  surveillance and censorship.

You can join petitions, write to Netflix or check out the Palestine Film Index offers a selection of hundreds of Palestinian films, documentaries and writings (with links to access them all) here.

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Global Witness’ investigation found that Google placed advertisements alongside articles by The Epoch Times, which are estimated to have generated close to $1.5 million in combined revenue for Google and the website owners over the last year. Global Witness believes that some of these articles breached Google’s own publishing policies that do not allow “unreliable and harmful claims” that “contradict authoritative scientific consensus on climate change”. Is it possible to have accountability in AdTech? I spoke to Guy Porter, senior investigator on the digital threat team at Global Witness and author of their latest investigation. Porter works in the climate disinformation unit, which leads investigations linking climate denial and disinformation to big tech and the platforms. 

NJ: Why is this investigation important?

Guy Porter: We think this is really important both because of scale and the apparatus that supports disinformation: Facebook advertising, Google monetization. Google commands the largest share of the digital advertising market and is helping to fund - and making money from - what we believe is opportunistic and dangerous information, Additionally, The Epoch Times is a big media empire. In 2019, it was one of the leading spenders on pro-Trump ads on Facebook. We're talking about big money.  Its publisher, Epoch Times Association reported a revenue of $128 million in 2022.

NJ: In response to your investigation in May 2024, which looked at Epoch Times spreading disinformation via Meta’s advertising platforms, the media organization responded saying that science around climate change, like anything else, was always a matter up for debate and that scientists often have differing opinions. How do you respond to that dizzying combination of free speech absolutism and climate change denial?

GP: The free speech argument is an unhelpful tactic that helps to delay climate action. These articles present these fringe views that are not peer reviewed as a growing consensus of scientific fact. We welcome people debating climate solutions. And we think that's really important to tackling the urgent climate crisis. But there are changes that need to be made to tackle monetization of this kind of content.
NJ: One of the changes you're hoping for is ad tech regulation. What would that look like? 

GP: Both the UN and also the EU Commission are looking at this really closely as we put forward in this investigation, advertisers are also suffering from limited transparency around AdTech. While there are tools that Google supplies to assure advertisers where their ads will appear, the system is opaque and advertisers rely on Google to stick to its own policies on climate denial.

NJ: One of the places where these ads denying climate change are running is in Brazil, where the impact of climate change has been relentless and devastating. Much of the climate disinformation is not disseminated in English: is that also why we need to pay attention to it?

GP: Absolutely. We also know from previous research by ProPublica that Google's performance in non English language websites is not great. The 2025 climate change conference COP is being held in Brazil – and we know that disinformation is rife around these meetings. We believe it’s crucial to protect the media ecosystem there.

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Much of the fear around personal devices being turned into remote controlled explosives is two fold: Could any of our devices and appliances be turned into bombs? What does this mean for international supply chain contamination? Writing about Hezbollah, Kim Ghattas notes that mothers in Lebanon turned off baby monitors out of fear for their childrens’ lives.

To begin with, it’s important to understand why Hezbollah relies on low tech like pagers and landlines. Reuters reported earlier this year that Hezbollah switched to low tech to counter Israel’s sophisticated surveillance tactics. Pagers also run on a different wireless network than mobile phones which makes them more resilient in times of emergency.

The AR-924 pagers that turned into explosive devices on 18 September were believed to have been made by Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese firm. Since the terror attack, Gold Apollo’s CEO has confirmed that it authorized another company, Budapest-based BAC Consulting, to use its brand name for product sales in certain regions. Gold Apollo has denied any links with BAC’s manufacturing operations. In turn, Hungarian authorities have reported that BAC Consulting was only an intermediary, with no manufacturing or production facilities in Hungary. They claim that Hezbollah bought its pager stock from a company registered in Bulgaria, Norta Global. The trail grows ever more complex, with Bulgarian authorities confirming that no customs records prove the existence of such goods being exported through the country. The Japanese company that was initially believed to have manufactured walkie talkies that blew up in the second attack in Lebanon, has also released a statement saying they discontinued making the devices in question ten years ago. 

An Indian man and a Hungarian woman who were part of the companies implicated in the manufactured devices are reported to have gone missing. 
Media coverage has both praised Israel for its tactical genius in targeting Hezbollah and described the attack as an act of terrorism — but it is important to remember that Israel is not the only country to have planted explosives in unexpected places. From the 1960s up until the 2000s, the US and CIA used multiple methods including exploding cigars and seashells in their attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Contaminating supply chains is also an old intelligence tactic, according to Emily Harding, a veteran of the CIA and the U.S. National Security Council, who told Kevin Colliers at NBC that these stories are often kept from the public: “Supply chain compromises are tried and true in intelligence work,” said Harding. “I literally cannot think of a single example that is unclassified.”

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PB: Haiti, which is just 700 miles from the coast of Florida, is the United States’ ultimate other. Americans know very little about it. When I tell people that I lived in Haiti for a while, a few would say, “Oh, I've always wanted to go to Polynesia!” And I'd say, no, not Tahiti, Haiti. This is the same Haiti that is a four hour flight from JFK. I think that geographical proximity stands in sharp contrast to the wild American ignorance about Haiti, and I don't think that ignorance is unintentional. We'd rather not think about it as Americans. We would rather not know the manner in which the United States, our country, has subverted Haiti from the very get go.

Haiti is the only successful slave rebellion in history and what they managed to do was kick out Napoleon's own army. They were the first republic in the entire world to abolish slavery. And this was at a time when Thomas Jefferson was president in the United States, and the US had 60 more years until its Emancipation Proclamation. Haiti was way ahead of the United States on these issues, and it posed a terrible threat to these white imperial powers. These imperial powers built enormous wealth on ideologies of white supremacy — you saw this with England and India, France and Haiti and the United States with plenty of its own enslaved people. In that moment, the moment of its birth, Haiti was a pariah to the white imperial powers.

A lot of times there's a kind of obsession with the things that threaten us. I'm no psychologist, but the neuroses and the racism of the United States says a lot more about the United States than it does about Haiti; about the ways in which we remain threatened more than 200 years after the founding of the first black Republic. We remain threatened by the idea of black people governing themselves. You can see this in the ways that over the past 35 years, and even over the past 15 years, the United States has really done quite a lot of meddling with Haiti’s democracy, to put it mildly, which is what has led to its current state of violence and insecurity, and the complete dismantling of the state.

NJ: We see the same stereotypes and rhetoric each time this happens — foreigners and immigrants eat strange foods, they want your jobs, they are violent. Yet the American economy needs immigrant workers. When those workers express their cultural identity, or need health care, then immigration becomes an easy target for resentment. It’s like saying: come here, work in our factories, but don't be visible or have needs. Is that a correct characterization?

 PB: There's this wonderful Haitian saying: If you want to kill a dog, say it has rabies. That's what JD Vance is doing. What he's really doing is trying to foment fear among Americans, right? Foment fear of change, of black people, of the other and galvanize that fear. And so a great way to do it is to say that Haitians, they're diseased or they eat pets. These tropes have a very long history, of the third world being a place of diseases, or the savages.

NJ: “Savages” who are devoid of compassion for animals unlike civilized people, and only know how to hunt and kill. 
PB: Exactly! And this idea of eating pets is also interesting coming from the Republicans, who pride themselves on eating meat. Like Vance who received some flak for adapting to his wife's vegetarian diet. I think for a lot of Haitians have felt, like, what the fuck do I need to say? Should Haiti’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and all the Haitian pet lovers need to now come out and say, actually, we don't eat cats and dogs?

I know what you mean about the critical mass, it’s like saying — go ahead, you can be different in America as long as you act the same. But I have a feeling that a lot of the anti immigrant sentiment does not come from the people in towns like Springfield. It seems like the farther you are from actually knowing immigrants, the easier it is to scare you. These terrible lies are a great disservice to Haitians and immigrants, of course, but also to the people in towns like Springfield, even to those who might have voted Republican. Many people do try really hard to welcome immigrants, to make room, make resources available, and try to do the right thing.

I’m thinking of the incredible grace of the family of the boy who was killed in a vehicular accident in Ohio last year, by a person from Haiti. His death was a terrible and tragic accident, and even now, his family is showing up to city council meetings and asking for his death not to be used as a political tool.

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Nishita Jha: Doctor Saha, why do you think we are obsessed with cults and how did your own obsession with cults begin? Relatedly, why do you think they are a source of such deep fascination in the world of books and cinema and streamers? 

Poulomi Saha: I think cults are much more than just a pop cultural phenomenon, they are a phenomenon that has seeped into all parts of our life, popular, political, social and psychic. The class that I started teaching during the pandemic [Cults in Popular Culture] began because, like many other people, I was spending my days and nights watching docuseries and listening to podcasts on cults. In some ways, it was one of the singular forms of feeling connected to other people. I was getting a little concerned for myself and I was pretty surprised to see myself giving up on my own, long held, sometimes innate reactions to cults. In some ways, the class was an attempt to make sense of this with hundreds of other people. Around me too, I saw the attention and obsession with cults getting more fanatical. It seemed like it was time to move this kind of social analysis outwards.

NJ: One genre of TikTok videos I know your students keep sending you is “What would it take to get you to join a cult?” and it’s a question that’s been memed and stitched by millions of users — a mini-cult of people who love cults on Tik-Tok, which is a platform that spawns its own consumer cults of Stanley Cup users and beauty treatments and such. Did writing your book make you more aware of the many cults that surround us today?

PS: The meme on Tiktok you’re referring to is fascinating because you also have this remarkable effect that in the repetition (through stitching the videos) you are producing a structure that we might actually call cultic: to participate in this imagination together. In the meme, someone says “Would you join a cult if they offered you a free lunch?”, you respond “Well, I would join a cult. I don't even need the free lunch. I would take a donut.” But what is really happening is that the two people now have something in common. They are repeating the same words back to each other so that they recognize that they think in the same ways, they are announcing an affiliation to each other, and that is a powerful thing. Memes are a really interesting and new vehicle to produce a kind of group think. I'm trying very hard not to pathologize it or to suggest that memes are hypnotizing people into mindless repetition or some hypnotic state. I actually think the repetition is actually a way to articulate a long standing desire to simply be like other people. So we see a kind of second form of sociality being produced here in social media, and we also see it in the world of politics. 

NJ: How does that need for belonging play out in American politics? 

PS: I live in Northern California — so I am in some ways, at the epicenter of a particular version of the cult phenomenon. I have a theory which I'm delighted to have proven wrong, that America is a unique place when it comes to cults. America in its vision of itself as this great open space which drives the settler colonial fantasy, has long been obsessed with newness. Americans have really envisioned themselves as a new man, long before the advent of something called the State of the United States, and well into the early part of the colonial project. That fantasy is so compelling and it stretches to all parts of American life, from politics to economics to society. And what it gives birth to is a really unique phenomenon, where we say this is the only place where newness is celebrated as innovation and it's not condemned as heresy.

In most other societies, if you announce the advent of a new messiah it's not just that you're going to have, like, local resistance. There are often overarching religious and/or social and political structures that will limit this. I mean, imagine a new messiah announcing their advent in Italy. It's hard to imagine, right? 

NJ: I see what you mean, in that there is almost a uniquely American obsession with what the era-defining Big New Thing will be, in culture and spirituality, tech, health and of course politics.

PS: We see the ways in which these kinds of things flourish outside the mainstream. What popular culture has done has brought the outside, the fringe, not just into the mainstream, but literally into our homes. We're watching, we're listening, we're obsessing on the internet, and this is where I think we're seeing a new vision of what cult culture is. When you have people who watch a docuseries become quite obsessed, what do they do next? They're not largely going out and joining these groups in the world. Instead, what they are doing is joining subreddits. What they are doing is getting on social media and producing Tiktok, what they're doing is actually trying to reproduce the feeling of being fully immersed with other people.

Along with the invitation to newness, at the same time it is also a highly normative conformity seeking culture. So you have powerful guardrails in place that would claim to keep most people outside of these radical choices, these insular groups, these new religious movements, except the more powerful the guardrail, the more powerful the interdiction, the more powerful the draw. 

NJ: How does the cult of personality shape American politics? What we see now is this almost perfect and uncanny merging of political leaders with social media and reality TV. They are characters with narrative arcs and followers, we watch whether we love them or love to hate them. 

PS: The cult of personality is so interesting because there's a way in which it operates is a totally different thing than social cults, but they do have a couple important things in common. The term “cult of personality” actually comes out of the Romantic period where Immanuel Kant spoke about the cult of genius — that there was a way of thinking and being in the world that should make you exceptional, and that exceptionality was singular in your mind, but always producing a kind of collective. The cult of genius was about finding these figures who had a particular kind of understanding of clarity of the world, a kind of philosophical elevation and becoming their followers. Now, when you become a follower, of course you never become the genius. Within the cult of genius, there's only one genius, and you have inside these followers who go looking for profound truth….

You think about charismatic leaders, whether they are charismatic figures like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, but also Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King … you cannot know how a person comes to have this kind of power. Again, they aren't faster, stronger, necessarily smarter, and yet when they speak, you feel yourself elevated, transformed, transported. When you have a kind of charismatic figure, so much of the power comes from the fact that they will often tell the story about themselves, a kind of self mythologizing in which they'll say things often like either I am an ordinary person or I was born ordinary. My parents were normal. They were working class, middle class. I had no silver spoon. I had no great grace from on high. What I am before you is utterly ordinary. And of course, as they say it, their effect is so extraordinary that it really kind of burnishes this image of magic, of something you cannot explain and you cannot touch, and it is so compelling. What happens is they begin to develop a following, and the followers all recognize that they witness the extraordinary in this figure. 

So you feel as though you are in the presence of the Divine and all around you when you go home and you're talking to your family when you go to work, you're trying to describe the inordinate force of this person. And people are like — that person? They're a buffoon, they're not very smart, they're not very successful, they're not a real billionaire. That dissonance, rather than breaking through the mind of the follower, actually solidifies the sense of a kind of magical capacity that the charismatic leader has.

Now the follower is also imbued with it because they believe they can see the truth that no one else can. It produces a kind of fanaticism. If you believe that you have access to a new kind of messianic figure and people all around you don't see it, it is very easy to begin to feel like you too are chosen. You too have a kind of special capacity.

It's incredibly compelling, and especially for people who have historically felt as though they're disenfranchised or that their birthright has somehow been taken from them, to have it resurrected. I mean, that's a pretty good compensation to having felt kind of economically disenfranchised for a couple decades.

NJ:  You may not have the answer, but I wonder if that also produces a profound alienation from the rest of the world that doesn't get it. I'm thinking of politics, of how easily groups that are fanatic, or disenfranchised can become militarized or turned into violent mobs. Is the leap from one to the other made easier through disinformation and mass media, and how easy it is to spread the word of the messianic figure?

PS: It does produce a kind of alienation, and I think that there are many different ways that people cope with that. A lot of mass media really flattens the experience of it, we've gotten very good at diagnosing not just misinformation, but a kind of misunderstanding in the followers of these charismatic figures. Here I am really profoundly thinking of Donald Trump. You'll see again on social media, the phenomenon of young reporters, usually lay reporters who go to these Trump rallies and they try to catch the follower in a kind of gotcha moment, to sort of reveal the fundamental cognitive dissonance in a MAGA believer.

So they'll say things like, now, how do you feel about the fact that Joe Biden didn't go to Vietnam because of bone spurs? And you'll have a person who's like, “He's a coward! He's a disgrace! He cannot be commander-in-chief.” And then the reporter will say, oh, I misspoke. I meant to say Donald Trump didn't go to Vietnam because of bone spurs, and then the follower will say, “Well, you know, my father had dropped arches. It was so painful, and that's a real danger, not just to himself, but to his platoon.” This is actually a video that I watched recently, and of course, as the viewers watching this on Tiktok or on Instagram we are supposed to laugh. We're supposed to think —  look at this sad, pathetic person who doesn't even see that they're being conned.

It is really satisfying for those of us who believe that we see the truth. We see beyond the smoke and mirrors, but it doesn't allow us to actually contend with what is happening individually to those people, socially, within that group and as these people live in the world.

But it is not possible that the people at the MAGA rally are totally unaware of the gap between what they say and what they believe. But you have to find some kind of compensation. People do that by refusing information that refutes their beliefs and surrounding themselves with people who share those beliefs. So the phenomenon of the Trump rally is important, it becomes a place and time where you get relief from the barrage of being told no, you're not right, you're wrong, not true, not good. In the space of that rally, everyone around you is saying, yes, they're saying you're not crazy, you're not stupid, you're not being manipulated by someone smarter than you. Community is bound together by so many things, including a mutually reinforcing truth, and that truth becomes more and more potent.

NJ: I’d like to go back to what you said about the American obsession with newness, but also that it is a society that is conformist, or wants to protect the old, in a sense. You see that tension play out with the candidates right now, where someone like Harris must always find a way to balance the fact that she represents newness — there’s never been a US President that looked like her — with someone like Walz, who fits into the American ideal of an older, white patriarch. If you had to make a guess, will America choose the new or the old? 

PS: I do think that you are putting your finger on the pulse of something that really underpins a lot of this conversation around cults of personality and politics. Think about the MAGA project — Make America Great Again is about a return to a prior moment again. At these rallies, you have people being asked, When was America great? And the way in which they're struggling to find a moment is telling — it's always a moment before they were born, always a moment of a kind of mythic abundance and freedom, the 19th century or the industrial revolution. When you press on it and say, well wasn't that before women had the right to vote, or wasn’t that an era of racial segregation … you realize that the actual moment matters much less than the fantasy that there was a kind of reparative moment in America's past where the new man had all of this abundance before him.

Donald Trump, for a non believer, is a terrifying, sometimes funny, but a kind of monstrous figure. For his believers, he is a prophet, and he is a prophet who is able to see more clearly than anyone, a moment where America was great and return us there, with a kind of future oriented promise.

What we also see in world history across multiple generations of world leaders is that charismatic authority is never correct. When they die, or there's a transfer of power, the next leader is either a failed charismatic leader. That is, they cannot reproduce the same intensity, or they're a bureaucrat.

Many political scientists have been speculating on what will happen if Trump does not win this election. If he does not win this election, will Trump fade away, but Trumpism continues to flourish? What many liberal theorists want to believe is that the cognitive dissonance will be revealed. That Trump’s followers will think, “Oh no, I've been following this fraud and con man all along. I see clearly now I repent. Let me be reincorporated into this rational state.” I don't know what will happen in the election, but I do think that the latter is very unlikely to happen. I don't think that even if Trump loses, we are going to see the skies parting and the light of knowledge falling on the dark minds of MAGA. I think his influence has drastically changed what it is possible to do in American politics, and there are too many smart, canny, charismatic political figures in the machine who will want to capitalize on the fact that people are clearly hungry for that feeling of being together, believing in this impossible thing that on the outside is being laughed at, but where you know you have access the truth and freedom and Liberty. I mean, that's what drives American politics, rhetorically, at the very least. 

Dr. Poulomi Saha is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and co-director of the program in critical theory. They are currently at work on a book about our abiding and potent obsessions with cults. Fascination is a state of rapt unbelief—the gripping curiosity and fervent disavowal of what we do not ourselves inhabit or experience and yet cannot shake. We aren’t simply frightened of or repulsed by cults. There is a powerful draw to these groups, to the possibility of utter self-transformation. At its heart, the book FASCINATION is interested in how cults reveal what we truly hunger for—spiritually, socially, politically, and culturally. Not just for those who join but for all of us who believe we never would. In FASCINATION, Saha explains why we love, hate, and love to hate cults—why we can neither lean in nor look away.

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CONTEXT

The struggle between the right to free speech and curbing disinformation has a long history in Brazil, which has the world’s fifth largest digital population. 

As early as 2015, Brazil’s government has, on separate occasions, arrested employees from Facebook and shut down WhatsApp for not complying with government orders quickly enough. Then in 2018, Brazil’s government handed its police force the power to police social media platforms.

In 2021, the “fake news law” in Brazil mandated that social media services reveal the identities and personal details of users who shared anything decreed to be fake news or which threatened national security in any way. It also granted the government the power to shut down dissenting voices in any part of the internet.  And in 2022, before the election between Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s government granted itself further censorship powers to curb the use of disinformation during election campaigns.

ENTER ELON MUSK

Much of Musk’s ire at present is directed towards one particular judge in Brazil, Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who has been described by the Brazilian press as “the defender of democracy” and “Xandão,” Portuguese for “Big Alex”, for his wide-ranging investigations and quick prosecution of those he deems to be a threat to Brazil’s institutions. 

Musk and de Moraes began to butt heads soon after far-right supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro rioted in Brazil this January. De Moraes asked X to purge far-right voices linked to the uprising, and Musk, who has frequently aligned himself with right-wing figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, accused de Moraes of censorship and stifling free speech. 

Last month, on Thursday, August 5, Musk ignored a 24-hour deadline from the Supreme Court to name a new legal representative for X, after the platform’s local office in Brazil was closed down mid-August. 

Soon after, de Moraes accused Musk of treating X like a “land without a law”, a place where misinformation, hate speech and propaganda thrive with no repercussions. Musk has responded with a characteristic tantrum (mantrum?) on X — he posted an AI-generated image of de Moraes behind bars, another image of a dog’s scrotum and called the judge “Voldemort”.

MUTUAL HYPOCRISY

Both free speech and democracy deserve better advocates in Brazil. While de Moraes is widely considered to be the man who saved Brazil’s democracy from the far right, disinformation and electoral interference, his unquestioned authority is cause for concern. Meanwhile, Musk’s haste in obeying right-wing governments in countries like India completely contradict his claims of being a “free speech absolutist”.

According to the New York Times, de Moraes has “jailed people without trial for posting threats on social media; helped sentence a sitting congressman to nearly nine years in prison for threatening the court; ordered raids on businessmen with little evidence of wrongdoing; suspended an elected governor from his job; and unilaterally blocked dozens of accounts and thousands of posts on social media, with virtually no transparency or room for appeal…His orders to ban prominent voices online have proliferated, and now he has the man accused of fanning Brazil’s extremist flames, Bolsonaro, in his cross hairs. Last week, de Moraes included Bolsonaro in a federal investigation of the riot, which he is overseeing, suggesting that the former president inspired the violence.”

A report from Rest of World says Musk has complied with 80% of the requests from governments to take down tweets — this is a 30% increase over what X (then Twitter) agreed to under previous leadership.

In India for instance, X blocked posts by journalists, celebrities and publications at the behest of the Modi government. The platform not only geo-blocked tweets in regions the government claimed social media was sparking public unrest during the farmer protests, but also globally banned accounts tweeting about the riots, including those of Canadian MP Jagmeet Singh and poet Rupi Kaur.

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First, let us skim the similarities: Like Zuckerberg and Musk, Durov is a tech-bro with a massive social media and messaging platform that has run into trouble with different governments. Like them, he is insanely wealthy, obsessed with freedom of speech, loves free markets, capitalism and posting hot takes on his favorite app. Durov rarely gives interviews, choosing instead to post updates, vacation photos and thirst traps with meandering captions to his 11 million followers on Telegram. Like many tech-bros, he has a fascination with his own virility and recently claimed to have fathered over a hundred children across the world via his “high quality donor material”. In 2022, he also made paper planes out of 5000 ruble notes (approximately $70 at the time) and Henry Sugar-like, flung them into a crowd of people from his window. 

But unlike the American heroes of Silicon Valley, Durov is a man fashioning his own legend as an international man of mystery. His arrest is a striking example of how a tech billionaire’s monopoly over global information infrastructure gives them–as individuals–incredible geopolitical influence. 

Initial reactions from Russia have framed Durov’s arrest as an instance of Western hypocrisy on free speech. Russians (including voices from within the Russian government) are urging the Kremlin to intervene on his behalf. Access is tricky, but military blogs show deep anxiety as to what his arrest means for the Russian military–which relies on Telegram as one of its primary means of communication in the war with Ukraine.

Durov’s arrest and reactions from Moscow have once again raised a question about his links to the Russian government. The Kremlin’s position continues to be firmly aligned with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (now based in Moscow). who described it as “an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association” and Elon Musk who has compared the arrest to being executed for liking a meme in 2030.

In a rare interview four months before his arrest, Durov described leaving Russia as a young child and moving to Italy with his family. His first experience with free markets, as he described it, convinced him that this was the way to live. His brother Nikolai was already a mathematical prodigy at school, and although Pavel struggled with English at first, his teachers’ dismissive attitude towards him spurred him to becoming the “best student”.

“I realized I liked competition,” he said with a smile.

The Durovs moved back to Russia when Pavel was a teenager, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Pavel’s father, a scholar of ancient Roman literature, had a new job, and the family was able to bring back with them their IBM computer from Italy. Nikolai and Pavel continued to thrive at school—they were now learning six foreign languages each, along with advanced mathematics and chemistry. In his spare time, Pavel was writing code and building websites for his fellow students. It was at this time that he built VKontakte, an early version of social media that soon became the biggest messaging platform across several post Soviet-Union countries. At the time, Vkontakte had a single employee: Pavel Durov himself.

The story of Durov’s run-ins with Russia’s government is better known: in 2011 and again in 2013, the government asked VKontakte to share private data belonging to Russian protestors and Ukrainian citizens. When Durov refused, he was given “two sub-optimal options”: he could either comply, or he could sell his stake in the company, resign and leave the country. He chose the latter. In 2014 Durov sold his shares in the company and left Russia, announcing his departure with an image post of dolphins and an immortal line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

This is also when Durov’s story begins to differ from the smooth narrative turns of American tech broligarchy. Nikolai and Durov created Telegram, a new platform with the ability to host crowds of up to 200,000 people in channels, multi-media messaging, self-destructing texts and the ability to hold secrets. Durov traveled the world looking for a place to set up an office and rejected London, Singapore, Berlin and even San Francisco. “In the EU it was too hard to bring the people I wanted to employ from across the world,” he told Tucker Carlson. “In San Francisco, I drew too much attention.” (The only time Durov has ever been mugged was in San Francisco, he said, when he left Jack Dorsey’s house and phone snatchers attempted to take his phone as he was tweeting about the meeting. Durov says he fought them off and kept his phone.)

“I’d be eating breakfast at 9 am and the FBI would show up,” he said. “It made me realize that perhaps this was not the right place for me.”

Durov became a citizen of the UAE and of France. In 2022, he was named  the wealthiest man in the UAE, His current net worth is 15.5 billion USD.  

In July 2024, Telegram had 950 million active users, placing it just after WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger. Telegram isn’t just one of the most popular messenger apps in Russia and in other post-Soviet countries, as digital freedoms are shrinking, the app’s popularity is growing across the world. The platform began to be used increasingly during COVID lockdowns when disinformation was rife, and platforms like Facebook were allegedly under pressure from governments to censor posts about the pandemic.

Telegram’s popularity has also grown through political crises and protests in Egypt, Iran, Hong Kong, Belarus, Russia and India—Telegram provides a secure means of communication and organization for protesters, but while calls for violence are explicitly forbidden on the app, little else is.

“Telegram is a neutral platform for all voices, because I believe the competition between different ideas can result in progress and a better world for everyone,” Durov told Carlson. But this glib take does little to address the very real concern about child pornography, revenge porn and deepfakes that are able to thrive on the app because of its lack of moderation.

In his telling, competition and freedom are the twin motivations behind all of Durov’s decisions. It’s always one or the other that will explain why he does what he does, whether that’s living in the UAE, resisting content moderation on Telegram, or refusing to invest in real estate and private jets. 

“Millions of people have been signing up and sharing content on Telegram in the last hour while Instagram and Facebook were down,” he posted after a Meta outage in March. “Telegram is more reliable than these services—despite spending several times less on infrastructure per user. We also have about 1000 times (!) fewer full-time employees than Meta, but manage to launch new features and innovate faster. Throughout 2023, Telegram was unavailable for a total of only 9 minutes out of the year’s 525,600 minutes. That’s a 99.9983% uptime!” 

Since his arrest and interrogation, prosecutors have said that the judge in Durov’s case sees grounds to formally investigate the charges against him. Durov has been released from custody, but is banned from leaving France. He  paid a bail of €5 million and must present himself at a police station twice a week. 

Durov’s arrest has also raised questions about whether tech titans can personally be held responsible for what users do on their platforms. In India, Narendra Modi’s government has already said that it will also be investigating Telegram, while the Indian press has been agog with details about Durov’s personal life, fixating on his virility and the blonde woman who has reportedly been missing since Durov’s arrest. Durov’s brother, the once-child prodigy Nikolai is also wanted by French authorities, and a warrant for their arrest was issued as early as March. Durov’s Toncoin has crashed since news of his detention. What remains to be seen is whether Pavel will fall prey to the cult of his own personality or regain that which he claims to value above all else—his freedom.

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