[Ingrid Melander and Guy Faulconbridge at Reuters]

"[Telegram founder] Durov, who has dual French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was arrested as part of a preliminary police investigation into allegedly allowing a wide range of crimes due to a lack of moderators on Telegram and a lack of cooperation with police."

At face value, this seems like an enormous deal: the idea that a social network operator should be arrested for not moderating and not cooperating with the police seems like a precedent with implications for a great many platforms.

Telegram has been blocked in Russia since 2018. While it's unlikely to be blocked as such in the EU, it's plausible to see a world where it's removed from app stores and made harder to access.

Decentralized platform builders in particular will be watching this carefully: what does this mean for people who are building censorship-resistant and governance-free platforms overall?

Of course, at the same time, we may not have all the information yet. We'll have to watch and see.

#Technology

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