Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested, conspiracy theorists do their thing
When French authorities arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov after his attempted meeting with Vladimir Putin, conspiracy theories spread like wildfire. Andrew Tate was early to spin the news in his favor, writing on X (formerly Twitter), “The owner of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has just been arrested in France for failing to censor the truth on his application. “Potential charges include support for terrorism, drug trafficking, complicity in crimes, mass fraud, money laundering, concealment, pedophile content, sanctions evasion, and more.” Others soon re-posted his non-falsifiable dog whistle, earning it millions of impressions and hundreds of thousands of likes. Mischaracterizations of Durov’s arrest proliferated. Fans of Durov, casting the billionaire as a bulwark of privacy and free speech, immediately posited that authorities were leveraging his arrest to coerce him to install backdoors in Telegram for governmental monitors. Of course, this theory assumes that Durov had consist