Democracy is not a spectator sport. You have to be vigilant for it through the years.
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.
If the rule of law is robust, we should abolish the police.
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__.
The paradox of tolerance isn't real. Laws are real. Someone could argue for whatever they want. If the law says it cannot be implemented, it doesn't matter if they win an election. It's just about the law.
This is about identity theft like selling credit card details, meth and child porn (telegram deletes 60 thousand such groups. Per month. It's a shitpile that attracts flies, evidently)
