You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity
every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
Today, the latest episode of TED Explains, where we take the biggest headlines of the
moment and offer clarity around what it all means, context on why it all matters.
In this live conversation recorded on September 4, 2024, online democracy advocate Eli Pariser
explains the details surrounding the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.
Eli sits down with TED's Whitney Pennington-Rogers to discuss what it means for the future of
tech oversight, free speech, and more, all coming up after the break.
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Stay tuned after this talk to hear a sneak peek of this week's episode.
And now our TED Talk of the Day.
Hello, and thank you for tuning into TED Explains, where we take the biggest headlines of the
moment and offer clarity around what it all means and context on why it matters, especially
for you.
I'm Whitney Pennington-Rogers, and I'm your host for today's conversation.
Now, a week a half and ago, Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of instant messaging app
Telegram, was arrested in France as part of an investigation into moderation of illegal
activity on the platform.
The roves arrest has raised questions around free speech, tech regulation, and the role
of government in all of this.
I'm joined today by author and online democracy advocate Eli Pariser.
He's the co-director of New Public, a nonprofit R&D lab for better digital spaces, and his
attitude collectively more than eight million times.
Hi, Eli.
Hey, Whitney.
Hi, thank you so much for being with us today.
Glad to be here.
Well, let's just dive right in.
I think first for the uninitiated, what is Telegram?
So Telegram, it's interesting.
It's kind of a riddle.
It is part messaging app like Messenger or Signal or WhatsApp, and it's part social media,
if you imagine a mashup of Discord or Slack and a messaging app, that's what Telegram
is.
The other weird thing about it is that part of its claim to fame, part of its value proposition
has been that it's a very free-wheeling space, that it doesn't respond to government requests
and that you can do whatever you want there.
But unlike an app like Signal, most of what goes on in Telegram is not encrypted, which
means that governments around the world can see into Telegram and all of the things that
are going on there.
And what does that mean for the audience that you see Telegram has attracted?
Is the target audience a little bit different than some of these competitor apps?
Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating.
It's big.
At this point, they claim up to a billion global users.
But it's this mix of the unfiltered reality and spin of what's happening in the war in
Ukraine from the Russian side, from the Ukrainian side.
Same thing in Gaza and Israel.
You get kind of the unfiltered and also fabricated narratives from both sides there.
Also, it became big in crypto circles and alt-right circles.
And in addition, it's become kind of like a great place on the Internet to talk about and
sometimes do crime.
And so if you're looking, there's a great piece from Willow Ramis at The Washington Post
recently, where the best way to figure out sort of the illicit ads on Facebook and on
Instagram is just to see if they list a Telegram group in the ad, because that's a
good tell that something suspicious is going on.
So it's become this kind of wild transnational place where people are, in some cases,
organizing and pushing back against authoritarian governments.
In other cases, you know, doing some of the worst things on the Internet.
Well, and that brings us to the charges that Pavel Durov received when he was arrested.
So he was arrested for allowing criminal activity on his platform for things like child sexual
abuse or sale of illicit drugs.
Can you break down the charges and what actually happened here?
What led to his arrest?
So it's worth saying, Whitney, like there's a lot that we don't know yet about exactly what the
case is that the French government is pursuing.
And I guess the way that this works and French law, you don't sort of have to specify all of
this at the outset when you when you arrest someone, you sort of say, like, these are the
things that we're looking into.
So there's a range of things that that were mentioned, including complicity in storing
child sexual abuse material, the most kind of serious crime, and also kind of a failure
to respond to law enforcement requests, which is kind of part of the telegram telegram legend
is that, you know, they they are uninterested in being responsive to governments.
But in this case, it sounds like perhaps the French government made a request as part of an
investigation, perhaps around child sexual abuse material and telegram didn't respond or
didn't respond satisfactorily.
And so when Pavel Durov, who is a French citizen, you know, came back onto French soil, he was
arrested. It's worth saying that there's one other charge that's part of this, which is that a
charge about sort of not registering telegram as a encrypted service in France.
So we don't totally know what that looks like.
But that's the people that I listened to and talked to in the space see that as kind of
different and potentially more more worrisome than some of these other charges from a free
speech standpoint, because there's a real question of when and how governments should be
able to crack down on the possibility of encrypted communication, and we can get more into
that as well.
I mean, and this is not there's this sort of precedent for this. This is not the first time
that these sorts of challenges have arisen for telegram.
I know in 2022, Germany fined telegram for failure to comply with with law there.
And last year, Brazil temporarily suspended the platform for failure to surrender data
connected to what they saw as neo Nazi activity.
So I guess what precedent do we already see here for telegram receiving pushback from
governments or, you know, sort of having this this level of oversight in other countries?
Yeah, well, I think just to zoom out, I mean, what is there is precedent for governments
pushing back on telegram.
There is not precedent for the head of a tech company that's a global tech company being
personally arrested and for a government trying to hold them accountable.
And that raises a whole new set of questions.
But just to zoom out for a second, I think, you know, it's interesting, this is all
happening at the same time that Brazil has banned x.
It feels like we're at this moment where there is this real grappling around one of the
most central and hardest questions of the Internet era, which is basically like who
should be able to control our digital spaces and is that should they be, you know, under
the sole control of some tech dude?
Should they be subject to national laws?
And if so, how should that work when they're actually kind of international
conversations? Should they be in the control of the communities that gather on them?
And so I think we're just we're at this really interesting moment where all of that is kind of
coming to the fore.
And the French government seems to be saying, perhaps is saying, once we know what they're
saying, you know, hey, you can't run a company on French soil and ignore our law enforcement
people. That's not OK.
But there's also a lot of concern and overtones here, because any time a government seeks to
hold accountable or start to place legal constraints around a tech firm that's facilitating
speech, you really have to wonder about and worry about the free speech connotations.
So all of that is kind of like in the in the mix here.
And to the point of free speech, I think speaking about Durove himself, there's sort of an
interesting thing happening where you have the organization Telegram, then you have Durove,
who has a history sort of in this space.
He refers to himself as a free speech absolutist.
He, in addition to Telegram, founded what is was at one point amazing still be the largest
social media platform in Russia and came under scrutiny by the Russian government for some of
the content that he allowed to be shared on that on that space.
So because how much about this arrest you think is about is about Durove and how much of this is
about Telegram as an organization?
I mean, I think they're very linked.
And I would also say this is one of the places where one of the challenges we have right now is
that Telegram is a very opaque organization.
We don't know a ton about it.
We don't know a ton about the ownership structure or its incorporation or a lot of the things
that you kind of want to know about an institution that was becoming important infrastructure for
millions or billions of people around the globe.
And so there's a way in which all of these tech companies are sort of personalized and closely
associated with their founders.
Mark Zuckerberg legendarily has this supervoting status at Meta and so has almost unilateral power
over the way that people communicate in billions of conversations around the globe.
Pavel Durove and Telegram similarly are kind of closely linked and we don't really get to know how
closely linked they are because we don't have a lot of the information about Telegram that we
might have about other other companies.
And so, you know, I think there's there's it has to be both.
But I would say when you like there is this conversation about free speech and that's a really
critical and important part of the conversation here.
But it's not the only part of the conversation.
And the metaphor, maybe I'm like stretching this a little bit.
But, you know, if you're a newspaper but your storage room is being used by people to sell
counterfeit items or whatever and the government says, like, hey, we were not into this use of your
storage room for legal activity, like that's not a free speech issue.
That's like a crime and government issue.
And if you don't let the government in, then you might reasonably get arrested at some point.
And so I think one of the questions that's swirling swirling around in all of this is, you know, how
much is it a question of free speech and how much is it a question of a democratically elected
government getting to say what is and is an acceptable behavior by companies that are operating on its
turf?
I mean, I think that the nuance there around this, you know, both thinking about telegram and how
they operate, but then also, you know, sort of what it seems is matter is it matters to to drove around
this idea of free speech and creating a space where people can can share information freely without
much moderation from or from the app itself, from the company itself, I guess what are some more of
the nuances around how information is shared and people are able to communicate freely on the
telegram app that are really important for people and understanding why this matters for us, whether
you use telegram or not, why this moment is really important.
Yeah, so I guess just to pull this apart a bit. I mean, number one, when we talk about free speech,
we're using language that was developed, you know, and a set of ideas that was developed at a time where
where some of these dynamics were just totally unimaginable. Like, you know, when the when the
writers of the US Constitution were writing the First Amendment, the idea that you could, you know,
speak from another country into the United States, or vice versa, in any kind of like large scale way,
certainly in any kind of broadcast way, you know, that that just would have been nearly unfathomable. And
so, so, so, you know, some of the paradigms that we have about how free speech to work and democracy
should work, are really just challenged by the scale and the speed and the the freedom of the
internet era. I think one of the dynamics we have here is that on the one hand, people being able to
talk to each other in a way that the government can't see into and control encrypted speech is
really important for democracy. And, you know, encryption used to just be like walls, like, I
would meet you in a place and have a conversation with you and no, no government could see into our
house. And so, and that was really important for people to be able to organize and fight power and
fight bad governments. And so we want to be able to hold on to that ability for for citizens to
organize them to coordinate with each other, even though we know that in some cases, when people
meet and have conversations, they may be talking about crime. On the other hand, the ability to do
large scale crime anonymously and across national boundaries is reasonably concerning. And when you
talk about child sexual abuse material, you know, if you're posting a picture of sexual abuse in a
large group chat that is populated by anonymous individuals from places all over the world, that
is, you know, deeply, deeply harmful. And it's something that governments have a reasonable reason
to want to control. And, and if you're facilitating that to happen, I think you can expect that you're
going to get a knock on your door from from governments that don't want their children to be
abused. I think that's a that's a reasonable position for almost anyone. And so, you know, I think the
the challenge here is we have an app that's that's doing a whole bunch of these things at once, it's
offering some encrypted communication channels, although way less than I think its boosters like to
suggest, you know, most of telegram is not encrypted. And you have to enable it in order for it to be
encrypted on like an app like signal. But you're doing some sort of really important free speech,
classic free speech work where you're enabling activism and enabling people speaking truth to
power. And you're enabling a bunch of these, you know, sort of really pernicious crimes and
communities. And the question is, you know, sort of, what should we do about that? And I guess, you
know, where where I where I gravitate myself in this is that it is important for, you know, people
to have a voice in how tech platforms operate. And the way that we do that is that we form
democratic governments, and we create laws. And so, in places where democratic critically elected
governments are saying, like, hey, we don't want this kind of behavior on our on our platforms, I
think that, you know, I kind of like my impulse is to say, that's a really important thing for these
tech companies to listen to. And there should be consequences if they're not listening to to the
voice of the people, because who else ultimately should you be accountable to?
Well, it seems like at the moment, each government addresses this sort of individually for their
country. And there is no broader oversight here for how this will affect everyone. And as you
mentioned, you know, telegram is, is you're not just communicating with people just in your nation,
but you can communicate with people all over the world. And so what do you think is the the right
approach here for how you think about regulating this and whether or not you know, I think that's
even that part seems a little is a big question, I think for a lot of people is whether government
should have a say in how this this is managed. How do we do this broadly for for folks around the
world and not just look at this nation by nation case by case?
So I guess I would say so. One of my heroes is Eleanor Ostrom, and she was this economist who
won the Nobel Prize studying, you know, how how commons are managed. And she really pushed back
against this idea that human beings, you know, that there was this tragedy of the commons that
human beings were bad at managing commons. And she pointed to all these cases where people are
actually like really good at managing commons and identified a bunch of key rules about sort of what
makes it possible to manage a common area well. And I'm raising all of this because in some ways,
these are, you know, information commons as that we're talking about. And so one of the things that
Ostrom observed is that is really important to kind of have this quality of subsidiarity where the
right decisions are being made at the right level, and that people have some control at a local level
of the things that have most affected them. And I think that's so wise about what works in human
nature and so contrary to how we've structured our digital systems in general. You know,
you asked a question about sort of how would we govern this at a global level? And I guess my
feeling is, you know, and Ostrom said this so beautifully, she always talked about sort of no
panacea. There's no one size fits all solution to a bunch of these problems. You have to think in
terms of structures that allow people a level of local control. And so but we built this digital
ecosystem, including Telegram, including meta, including a lot of these tools that that are,
you know, essentially one one piece of software, one algorithm is supposed to serve, you know,
two billion, three billion people, whatever it is, around the globe. And I think that's impossible.
Like, I think we're reaching the acknowledgement that you can't do it that way. And you certainly
and you don't want to do it that way. Because whether it's Mark Zuckerberg, or it's Pavel Durov,
or it's Elon Musk, you know, relying on one centralized person or even one centralized
entity to work through all of the nuances of how human beings should communicate
in millions and millions of different places around the world, you know, is not going to work.
And so what's exciting to me at this moment, is that we're also starting to see real explorations
of what it would look like to do this differently. And that means kind of allowing people
ways to govern themselves at a more local level online, and to take on some of these responsibilities
at the right level. Now, it's worth saying that just like with a federal government,
there's some things that probably need to happen in a more centralized way. And probably,
you know, there are pieces of getting rid of child sexual abuse material online,
that need to happen in that way, right? If I'm if I'm starting, it's like being a small state,
and you don't want to have your own arm, you want to you want the protection of the national army.
So there are some things where you really need that kind of like, centralized, federalized
infrastructure. But there are a lot of these decisions that should be pushed to the edges.
And I think we're seeing the birth of a new set of kind of communication tools and social media
tools that are investigating what does that really look like to do? And now back to the episode.
And what are some examples that if you would share of these sort of tools that are approaching
this and what you would think is the a better way? Yeah, so, you know, we're starting to see
this with first mastodon and then blue sky and some of these other sort of things that initially
look like a Twitter clone, but that are actually structured really differently so that you can
govern the the communities, the rules of and dynamics on them at a more localized level.
These it's worth saying that these kinds of like decentralized or federated networks pose a whole
bunch of interesting new questions about where legal liability lies. But they do because they
work more like email where there's a kind of open protocol that allows different
entities to communicate with each other rather than a kind of single closed piece of software
or application. They offer much more of an opportunity for people to kind of experiment
with different ways of operating. I think one thing that's really compelling that you've shared
is that you have these platforms that enable you to create space where you can
activate your community around issues that really matter, you know, affecting things like human
rights and other issues that are just critically important, but also allow for the proliferation
of things that maybe are not are not so great. So are there solutions in some of these platforms to
how you can allow for one thing to happen and not the other? Or does that still seem to be
a challenge that's just really remains insurmountable? So I think both like, like,
just to be clear, this is so, so hard. These questions are really, really hard. And the question
of, you know, content moderation, in general, is sort of like a like root level human culture
question of what is acceptable and what it's not acceptable. And does this word mean this or that?
These are really, really challenging things to get right, which is one of the reasons that I think
we need, we need ways of doing this that are much more kind of flexible and, and less, you know,
activity pub, which is the protocol that Mastodon runs on, there's a really interesting and exciting
set of efforts to build some of these kind of infrastructures that would support allowing
someone who sets up their own server to make sure that there isn't, you know, terrible sexual abuse
material on it, for example. And to do that in a way that they can still decide, you know, a lot of
the free speech rules on their platform, but they can also make sure that that kind of that kind of
stuff is filtered out and they don't accidentally become a hub for something really, really damaging
or harmful or pernicious. So I think we are starting to, you know, and blue sky likewise,
has this really interesting idea around different kind of moderation services, where, you know,
imagine that you can kind of apply these filters or these layers to a set of conversations so that
you can decide, you know, maybe, maybe you want a place where people are not using slurs or not
using profanity. Okay, apply that layer optionally at the level of an individual or the level of a
community, but you don't have to apply it at the level of the company. And I think, you know, that's
it sounds like progress and that seems that there's an opportunity there for us to really
find, see some growth in this space, which is exciting. And going back to the charges
against Roe from France and thinking about government's role in all of this.
So we're, you know, clearly still not in a place yet where we really understand
how government should be involved here. And I imagine this is obviously a space where there's a
disagreement. And since his arrest in France, we've seen South Korea has filed similar charges
against him. So I'm curious if you think that this is a moment where we'll see more countries
come out with even more charges, will there sort of be an avalanche of charges against him coming
from all over the world? And what do you think will be the long term impact of that?
Yeah. So I think it's, it's, you know, again, it's really hard to tell because we don't have
a bunch of the critical details and maybe we'll get them and either the whole thing will feel
like a oppressive attempt by the French government to stifle a free speech advocate. Maybe we'll get
them and we'll go like, yeah, this dude should have replied to the subpoena that came from law
enforcement trying to solve a really important crime. So I think, you know, and maybe it'll be a
mix of both. And this is part of what's so challenging in these issues is, you know,
when you run a platform that messily combines all of these different attributes, you know,
it's hard to tell. Is someone, is a government coming after it because they want to stifle
the conversation about Israel and Gaza, or are they coming at it because they want to protect
their citizens' ability not to be harassed or to be sold counterfeit goods or to be deep faked into
pornography online. And so, you know, I think Telegram at this point does, does, facilitates
a lot of those things. And that's what makes it kind of like messy. And that's also what makes it
unusual. You know, I think even acts under Elon Musk, I think is probably more responsive
to law enforcement requests than Telegram is. And certainly when you talk about a Google or
Facebook or some of the other large platforms, you know, they've decided that they're going to
obey national laws in most cases. And so, you know, this is kind of like, I think I would
hesitate to read too much into it, just because it's such an unusual posture that Telegram has
taken. So to you, then it doesn't totally feel like, I guess, a watershed moment in how we think
about tech regulation, or I guess even thinking about like how other founders, the CEOs of tech
companies should, we should expect that they might respond to similar inquiries from governments
that there's, this isn't a shift in what we've already seen in terms of reaction and cooperation.
Well, I think it is, it is indicative of this important moment about, again, who gets to decide
what's going on in these spaces, and what control do governments have realistically
when you have a company that's incorporated outside your soil that doesn't require, you know,
doesn't have a business that is easy to cut off, you know, how should governments respond to that?
And when it's both a service that's allowing for some really important speech and allowing for some
really bad crimes, like what is the appropriate response? And so I think that's all coming to
a head with Telegram. I think it's coming to a head in some ways with X and Brazil. And I think
we'll continue to see that. That's going to be a big part of the story of tech and government
in the next decade is how does this stuff work itself out? And where can we expect and
require these businesses to moderate themselves? And where do democratically elected groups of
people weigh in? And P.S., also, you know, how should we think about this in more authoritarian
contexts where, you know, governments are trying to stifle speech that they don't like,
and they don't have a democratic legitimacy? And I think, you know, what's really interesting
here is that it's so gray, right, that there's, you can have governments that are interested in
both sides of these things, that it's not just very black and white world. Governments just want
one thing, of course, right? And so we actually shared on our social channels yesterday that
we were going to be having this conversation, and we gathered some questions from our community.
And also, for those of you who are watching live now, we encourage you to also ask any
questions you have, and we'd love to pose those to you as well, Eli. But one of the questions we
received was, how do we hold people on social responsible for the information they disseminate?
So I guess this goes beyond just thinking about, you know, the droves and the Zuckerbergs and people
who are running these platforms, but the actual users, what are some better ways we can ensure
that there's more regulation of what people are actually doing, people are taking more
responsibility for their own actions in that way? Yeah, well, I think, I mean, first, let me say,
like, I consider myself a fan and supporter of free speech. And part of that means, like,
being okay with, and even fighting for the rights of people to be deeply wrong on the internet,
and beyond wrong, you know, gross and cringy, and like, saying things that I really hate.
You know, and so, I think, to some degree, that's just part of living in a world where
you're hearing from lots of other people is that you're going to come across a lot of that stuff.
I think that the challenge that we have right now is that it's easy to reach huge groups of people
with speech that is really harmful, that's untrue, libelous, a crime itself, as with child sexual
material, you know, and there aren't kind of the circuit breakers that prevent that from
happening. And so, whereas, you know, people always used to be able to say, pre-internet,
terrible things to each other, whatever they want to each other, misinformation, or disinformation,
or bad things, but they weren't able to access groups of, you know, 100,000 people, a million
people easily, and now that's easy. And so, I think we have to start thinking about this
in those terms, which is that kind of with great reach comes great responsibility, and that there
are probably tiers of expectation in terms of what your behavior is and what your adherence
to the norms in the space are in terms of your ability to reach larger and larger groups of
people, and that if you want to reach a million people, then you need to take some responsibility
and some care in a way that is different than, you know, talking to your friends or talking to
another individual. And when we think about countries that sort of have best practices when
it comes to thinking about the way they work with tech companies and work with these platforms to
ensure that things are happening safely in democratic ways as well, we have a question
here where someone asks, how can we ensure that tech platforms remain free and open without the
heavy hand of government interference? And then they say, as we've managed in the UAE, which I
think is really meaningful here, because that's where Telegram is headquartered. And I'm curious
if you think that there are countries that seem to have a better approach to this than others.
I don't know if I would allow myself in general in a policy sense with any particular country,
I think a lot of countries have, it's a really mixed bag. And there's also so many different
issues here. So if we're talking about encryption and the ability to have conversation that's truly
private, you know, there are some countries like Germany that are really pushing for encryption to
be more part of the tech ecosystem and even to require it. In some cases, there are other
countries like Spain, just to name two different countries in Europe that are, you know, seeing it
as a threat to the government and seeking to undermine it. And no doubt, there's all sorts
of machinations behind the scenes by intelligence agencies and others to break encryption
and to be able to see inside the black box that exists. So, you know, there's a really,
but those countries then may have really different policies when it comes to misinformation or hate
speech or, you know, doing other kinds of crimes. So I guess we're still in this moment where
it's not like there's a country, I think, that has totally nailed it on digital speech policy.
And I think we're also in this moment where, you know, because there are ways in which virtual space
we imagine it to exist beyond any given jurisdiction, but actually it does exist in
particular places. My body is in a particular place. That means I'm subject to a set of roles
in the United States. The servers that I'm using are in a particular place. And that means they're
subject to the roles of the places that they are. And so, you know, I think part of what we're
experiencing is the bringing to ground kind of some of our more fanciful notions of the internet
that it's just this thing that exists virtually. Well, no, it actually like, you know, if you have
a military, you can go like take some of the pieces of critical infrastructure. And so what the laws
are and the places where that infrastructure exists really matter. And so there are some
questions also that we received around like what does this actually mean for Telegram? What happens
now? So do you foresee that Telegram itself will be restricted in some way as a result of these
charges? It's really hard to know how it's going to play out. And Telegram seems to be adopting this
kind of fighting posture and has certainly lots of communities that want to see it fight. I think on
the other hand, I think that in the large scheme of things, the idea that, you know, that you can
resist all of the world governments in applying their laws is probably not going to work out.
And I also think, you know, there's this irony to how Telegram is created, which is, on the one hand,
you know, it's kind of talking this talk of being, you know, being opposed to government
intervention in what goes on there. On the other hand, part of the reason we're talking about
Telegram and we're not talking about Signal or we're not talking about WhatsApp is that Signal
and WhatsApp are encrypted by default. So those companies don't have any idea what's going on
on their platforms and neither does anyone else. And surely there are bad things and crimes
happening there too, but governments and civil society and other people can't look into them.
And so, you know, Telegram is in this very awkward position of essentially inviting people
to do crimes out in daylight and then at the same time trying to stop the police from coming
and disrupting those crimes. And I'm not sure that that is going to be a sustainable model.
I mean, it seems like the question also then should be around encryption and whether or not
that is something that should be regulated in some way. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.
I mean, again, I'm a huge fan of Signal. I think Signal is really like an exciting model
of what tech downright might look like. And part of the reason it's exciting is it's not
kind of data extractive. It's not trying to sell you as a product to someone else.
The encryption is strong and that's kind of the core product. But Signal very deliberately is not
a place for large groups. And I think that's a smart decision for several reasons. One is,
I think encryption, you know, the ability to have a truly private conversation makes sense
as something to protect when we're talking about a person or a small group of individuals.
When we start talking about a larger group of people, you run into two problems. One is,
you know, I think from a regulatory standpoint, again, it starts to push on these questions of,
like, well, if you're talking to millions of people, maybe you do have some responsibility
about what you say, and maybe that ought to be more public than your conversation with your friend.
On the other hand, when you're talking to millions of people, it's going to be really
hard to make that in a way that isn't, you know, that doesn't leak essentially, that isn't
visible to someone in power anyway. And so, you know, what does it mean to have an encrypted
service that millions of people are using in one chat that, you know, is another set of questions.
So, I think encryption is absolutely an important part of enabling people to have,
not just to have real relationships, but to fight power online, right? If I'm operating a company
and I'm trying to stop people from unionizing, the thing I want to be able to do is to see into
everyone's conversation so that I know who the underlings are, who are fomenting trouble. And
I want to be able to have that conversation in a way that the boss can't see what I'm doing. And
so protecting that is really important. But again, I think that's different than allowing
these really large scale conversations to happen with no oversight or regulation whatsoever.
And that's kind of where I would draw that distinction.
And then I guess I wonder for other tech companies that are watching this, you know,
you know, what do you think are the actions that are happening, the conversations that are happening,
I guess, and those companies, the actions that might take place in the days or weeks to come
sort of preemptively as they're watching this whole thing unfold with Telegram?
Well, I mean, I think you have a big distinction between Telegram, which I think has, you know,
under 100 staff, reportedly, it's a pretty small operation signal. Likewise,
you know, I think the total budget for signal is $40 million, which is a rounding error
for Meta, which has whole, you know, kind of like ambassadorships to each government
that are making sure that everyone feels happy and comfortable with what happens on Meta. And so
I think you have this real distinction between kind of the way that Big Tech is playing. And I'm
sure Big Tech is not very bothered by any of this, because, again, you know, they've wired
a lot of these relationships. On the other hand, you know, if you're a smaller operator,
then you're really thinking about sort of how do I operate in this international,
fraught international context, where it's really hard to be responsive to, you know,
120 different governments across the world with a team of 60. And I guess, you know, the challenge
there is, I think probably, you know, this is just one of the weird things about the internet that
you can reach this kind of scale of reach, you can be in 120 countries, but really be unequipped
to deal with the rules or regulations of all of those different places that you've leapt into.
And I guess I don't, it's not clear to me that that doesn't mean that we should actually kind
of scale those things together, that you ought to be able to be responsive to the governments
of places where you're operating. And so when we're thinking about this story, so
now, Durope was arrested, he's been released, and he's now been ordered to report to a police
station in France, I think, every two weeks. So what happens now? I guess, what are the,
what can we expect to see happen over the next few days or weeks? And how long before this story
feels like it will have fully unfolded and resolved? Well, you know, I think in the near term,
we'll learn a lot more about exactly what the French government's case is and how strong that
case is. And again, I think there are a lot of people who I trust who are legal experts who say,
you know, there's a very good chance that this is actually, you know, a pretty clear case of
someone, you know, ignoring the law, and they can. There's also a real possibility that this
looks much more borderline, and even that it looks like an attempt to stifle speech that's
unwanted, that isn't, you know, the sort of worst. It's easy to say, as soon as you start talking
about child sexual abuse material, then that justifies almost anything. And so, you know,
that would be the worry. So we'll find out a lot more about that in the days to come.
As you said, there's also this other question of how other governments are going to respond
to Telegram and to all of the behavior that's happening on Telegram. And then there's this
question of how other platforms will. And I guess I think, you know, what's interesting is
a lot of these tools, they're not interchangeable. And certainly Telegram has a bunch of unique
aspects to it that make it desirable for the people who are on it. But, you know, one of the
things that we saw with me that I thought was really interesting was that when the Brazilian
government shut down X, within several days, over 2 million new people had signed up for Blue Sky,
which is, again, you know, sort of a Twitter clone based on more decentralized principles. And so
it's not that hard to move. And one of the questions that we'll have is,
you know, on the one hand, maybe this is just whack-a-mole forever. Maybe someone's going to
create, you know, Telegram too, and everyone's going to go there until they find that guy.
On the other hand, you know, maybe this is an opportunity to gravitate toward infrastructures
that make a little more sense, are a little more kind of thought through from a philosophical
standpoint. And, you know, and maybe we'll land in a place that is a more stable equilibrium.
And who do you see as the driver of that? I mean, I guess in this case, there's this arrest. But
is this something that you think comes from the people, the users? You know, how do we initiate
that sort of chain of events? Well, I guess, you know, to me, I mean, a lot of this does end up
being kind of group behavior. And that's what we saw in Brazil, where, you know, why did people
go to Blue Sky and not Mastodon or not Nuster, or not some of the other, you know, sort of
decentralized alternatives to Twitter or to X. That's where everyone decided to go. And so,
you know, some of these things really are kind of group behavior, herd behavior.
But I really think one of the lessons here is it's important to kind of be an informed consumer
of the tech that you're using. And there were a lot of people who are saying without any evidence
that Telegram was this super secure place to be. If you're if you're turning on the encrypted group,
the encrypted one on one chat, like that is encrypted. But actually, most of what's happening
on Telegram is less secure than a bunch of the stuff that's happening on WhatsApp and Signal. So,
you know, kind of you can't believe everything that you hear about what these platforms are,
and starting to really understand, you know, it's almost like, you know, with with food,
we now know that like where things come from and how they're made really matter. And you can have
something that superficially looks the same. But depending on, you know, how it's how it's created,
how it's sourced, it's going to actually affect you in a really different way. And so, you know,
that's kind of where we are with tech right now, where I think people are realizing that they need
to be more tuned into what are the what are the values of the platform that I'm using? What are
the who is who owns this? Who and what are they trying to do? And, you know, and how does that
match with my goals? And, you know, I think that's, that's part of how we're gonna need to do tech in
the 21st century. Well, I mean, I wonder then for folks who are watching this who maybe feel like
this is an interesting story for me to watch happen, but I don't feel very connected to this,
like, this is not something that actually is impacting you or affecting me in some way. And
I imagine if you've stuck around for this long, you probably are not in that camp. But, you know,
I'm curious for people who really look at this and they're like, I don't use telegram. And,
you know, I'm not as keyed into what's going on in that in that world. What are the big takeaways,
I think, for for all of us, regardless of our level of involvement here?
Yeah, so I think I mean, the, the, the big question we should all be thinking about,
because it affects all of us, and it will affect all of us is, how do we who do who should have
control? How do we want power to work in our digital lives? And if you think it matters now,
it's going to matter more as we spend time and, you know, whatever metaverse AI stuff is cooking,
right? Like, and so I think we're in a pretty broken moment in terms of how power works online,
I think the idea that people around the globe have to ultimately submit to the changing opinions
of a few billionaires, largely centered in America, like, that's a crazy way to run a
communications environment, we should probably like, think beyond that. And I would also say
that, you know, well, it feels like a big project, building communication infrastructure is something
that people and countries have innovated and done many times through history. And now might be a good
time to think about doing that again. So, you know, we've created public media, we've created
public libraries, we've created a whole bunch of institutions that help facilitate people
communicating in a democracy. And I think if we're reaching the limit of kind of this particular
freewheeling, individual founder driven, largely Silicon Valley moment, maybe that's a good thing
because maybe there's some new paradigms to be discovered around the corner.
Well, it sounds like we're definitely at the dawn of a new era when it comes to these conversations.
And I just really appreciate you for taking the time today. Eli to talk to us about all of this.
Thank you so much. I learned a lot. And I hope all of you who are watching also did. So thank
you for that. And thank you to those of us of you who have joined us. Thank you.
Thank you. Really great to be here.
That was Eli Pariser and Whitney Pennington Rogers in the latest episode of Ted Explains.
If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at Ted.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the Ted Audio Collective. This episode was
produced and edited by our team. Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson,
and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Faizi-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Toppner
and Daniella Vallerezo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet.
Thanks for listening. Jennifer Vale studies friction and how to deliver just the right
amount of it. Like when you get a flu shot. If friction was working against you so much that
that needle is having to be pushed multiple times and harder and harder because the stopper is
getting stuck. You would definitely know the hidden role of friction in our lives. That's next time
on the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. Subscribe or listen to the Ted Radio Hour wherever you get your
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