Aiding and abetting is also a crime

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/09/2024 (600 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Earlier this month, French prosecutors charged Pavel Durov with enabling organized criminal activity, and enabling the dissemination of child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud.

But Durev is not just any run-of-the-mill accused: he’s the billionaire CEO of Telegram, one of the world’s largest messaging services.

There are those that will no doubt argue that his arrest amounts to an attack on freedom of speech — in fact, X’s Elon Musk has already done so — but that’s just muddying the waters.

Stop and think for a moment about the Toronto Dominion Bank.

The bank is facing a fine in the United States that could reach US$3 billion over the bank’s failure to have strong enough anti-money-laundering safeguards in place.

The argument for the fine is that the bank’s systems weren’t strong enough to prevent them from being used to facilitate a crime — in fact, some of TD’s customers did launder money because of the lax safeguards.

It’s remarkably similar to the way Telegram is accused of lacking safeguards to prevent the distribution of child pornography on its network — but no one is arguing that TD’s fines are going to result in a chilling of freedom of speech, or, in fact, freedoms of any kind. There’s a pretty straightforward understanding that facilitating criminal acts — even through inaction — can carry legitimate penalties.

Telegram’s defence has been the basic go-to of social media companies: that they are just a kind of pipe, and not responsible for whatever kind of horrendous material flows through it. (Think of that argument this way: if you ran a store selling magazines featuring child pornography, no one would accept that you could defend yourself from charges of distributing the material by saying, “But, your honour, I just sell them. I’ve never looked at what’s in them.”)

Telegram doesn’t moderate the material that it carries: it’s even been credibly described as having been ISIS’s main communications hub for over a decade.

We’ll no doubt hear plenty more about the threat to freedom of speech and freedom of expression as the Telegram charges proceed.

It’s fascinating, though that those making the claim have the most to lose from the consequences of delivering hate speech or child pornography, or handling message services for terrorists. They tend to be those who make money — lots of money — from the near-free-for-all that the internet can be.

There’s a bottom-line threat to technocrats like Musk if Telegram is held responsible for what they are charged with doing: facilitating criminal activities and distributing the products of those crimes, even without being an active criminal agent.

Other social media empires have to ponder the risks they are taking if they carry material that is illegal. They also have to consider a growing effort by a number of countries to regulate the destructive role of social media in the world — everything from hate speech to instigations to riot to the dark criminal world that Telegram is accused of facilitating.

Though the social media giants like to portray themselves as free-speech absolutists which help topple despots and give the downtrodden both a voice and an electronic town square where they can meet safely, that’s only half of the equation.

The beauty carries its own curse.

An open pipe can carry sewage — or toxic waste — just as easily as it can carry clean water. Especially if you choose to look the other way.

The simplest way we can put it?

If you were arrested for driving the getaway car at a bank robbery, you couldn’t argue you were innocent of robbing the bank because you hadn’t set foot inside its walls.

A reckoning is coming.

Maybe even a tech-oning.