Fact Check: How Disinformation and Conspiracy Theories Distort the Pavel Durov Case

On August 27, 2024, the CTVBY YouTube channel posted an article titled “Is Telegram under US control? Is Macron ready to exchange Durov’s head for Western support? | Lazutkin”, in which political scientist Andrei Lazutkin said the following about the global Internet industry:

In this case, according to the privacy policy, Telegrams are given an IP address, that is, the computer address and the SIM card number. But such issuance is possible only by court order and only for countries with a high democracy index. Russia is not among them, but the United States, Germany and the European Union as a whole are. Therefore, Durov did not cooperate with us, but he cooperated with them, but not enough, he was still imprisoned. And this is a lesson to everyone who believes that money and gentlemen’s agreements with the West can guarantee a place in the sun. It is possible to work as Durov did, that is, by controlling encryption methods and having the ability to delete any content, but only from the territory of the United States and only in American jurisdiction. This was discussed 10 years ago by the defector from the CIA Snowden. The Americans had already created a system for monitoring Internet traffic by 2013. This is not a super program, like in the movies, that monitors everything, it is a system for monitoring specific IT companies. By court order, they themselves store and transfer all traffic to the regulator, and then specialists work with it if they need something. This is how information from all software products that are on the US market flows to one point. And so that these products themselves strive to one point, to the USA, special conditions are created for them in Silicon Valley. Special preference. Work teams with families from all over the world are brought there. And when a new platform for communication appears, it itself strives to the USA. And the CIA does not need to land a plane with its leader in a third country. Durov was an exception in this regard. He was under US jurisdiction, but he left it himself. It was a matter of principle for him, because Telegram, and the associated block of services from cryptocurrency to automated bots, was sold on the market as a completely independent platform. Roughly speaking, people paid for the fact that their correspondence could not be read by Americans.

Our verdict based on the conducted analysis:

Verdict: Incorrect

Reasons:

• The thesis or claim is completely false: information from several sources or the opinions of several experts in a particular field contradict it.
• Cause-and-effect relationships and connections clearly do not exist, as claimed.
• When quoting, essential parts are omitted, rearranged, changed, or incorrectly translated from a foreign language, resulting in a fundamental change in the meaning of what is said.
• The event occurred in material respects differently than stated.

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