I am pretty staunchly pro-privacy, but this arrest has little to do with
> permits the sharing of information and ideas that are in opposition to Western domestic and foreign policy(Israel, Ukraine, China etc)
It is about drug sales and extremism, that last one being about alt right / anti-vaccine crazies / terrorism, whatever else extremism du jour.
Seems like you're the one living on a different planet.
With that vigilance, it helps to be able to accurately assess the problem. In this case, Durov wasn't arrested for non-Western aligned subject matter. He was arrested for tacitly allowing drug trade and extremism on his app. Yes, Telegram is deleting many of these groups, but it is a token effort at best.
If Telegram ramps up the moderation of these efforts, perhaps the charges against Durov will be dropped. But if they continue to allow these whilst upping the moderation against.. say.. pro-Russian groups, Durov stays jailed. Hence, accurately assess the problem, and choose to work on it.
For what its worth, I lean libertarian with a progressive bent, so in my book anything that is not overly dangerous should be allowed to be communicated.
- Weapon sales? Probably not.
- XTC sales? Go ahead.[0]
- Nutella boycot? Go ahead.
- Infiltrating a local government to sabotage it? No.
[0] Yes, I am fully aware drug production funds violent organisations and there are tonnes of externalities like chemical waste dumping. That needs to be fixed via legalizing, it is not an inherent problem of drug sales.
You are very mistaken. Democracy requires defense. Everyone can have its own stupid opinion, but that is not the point.
Actively sabotaging society via campaigns is something any sane democratic society should defend against (all western "social" media are relentlessly hit by troll bots and disinformation campaigns, funded by your favorite dictatorships like Russia and China).
It is no wonder that Twitter for example got in the hands of Apartheid Musk.
The paradox of tolerance, read it up. It is a __paradox__.
They gathered in front of politicians their houses in large groups, sometimes even with torches, hoping to scare even the kids inside the house.
They sent myriad of death threats.
Totally not extremist.
(Do not take notice that China vaccinated their own people though, or the cognitive dissonance might be too much).
__
1. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-china-covid-disinformation-ca...
So yes, the alt-right is an anti-democratic extremist group.
As for anti-vaccine groups, their contribution to the death toll of past pandemics is no secret to any moderately informed person.
As for what happened on January 6th, it was in practical terms a concentrated bit of aggressive protest theater, and far from anything seriously resembling an attempted coup. You'd have to be deluded by ideology to call it something so serious. For example, that event was much smaller than the enormous amount of government property damage and calls to topple governments made by a much larger number of people during the earlier Floyd protests across the US and other countries. Would you call those extremist too?
In any case, by naming the most radical actions of a certain subset of a wider belief system as a reason for considering all aspects of that wider belief system as extremist and worthy of banning, you're just another garden variety autocratic monkey at heart, looking for ways justify banning whatever concept doesn't fit your tribal identity.
By your ridiculous logic, any belief system could be justifiably banned because in some ambiguous way, it's "responsible" for the specific activities of certain people who hold to its most extreme version, though the two things (a wider system of beliefs and specific people's active choices) are separate.
