The French government is one of the worst European persecutors of free speech, and it just added another flagrant abuse to its list by raiding X’s office in what many, including the CEO of Telegram, allege is a politically-motivated move.
The UK, Germany, and France have all become as synonymous with aggressive government censorship as openly dictatorial and socialist regimes. Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has some personal experience with how biased the French government can be against free speech, as the nation’s officials actually arrested him back in 2024 over his reluctance to comply with extreme demands.
Durov posted on X Tuesday morning, “French police is [sic] currently raiding X’s office in Paris. France is the only country in the world that is criminally persecuting all social networks that give people some degree of freedom (Telegram, X, TikTok…). Don’t be mistaken: this is not a free country.”
One might contest his inclusion of TikTok, given that it is still partially owned by the genocidal and anti-West Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but it is true that the French government — which frequently panders to the CCP — seems to base its investigations into and persecution of platforms not so much on real national security threats (after all, French officials are fine with allowing in hordes of unassimilating Muslims), but on whether it can sufficiently repress free speech on those platforms.
The Paris prosecutor’s office and Europol were involved in the raid on X’s office in France, according to Fox Business. It appears that the raid is the result of a fairly new Paris investigation, added to the investigation that has already sparked controversy both in France and abroad. One might almost say, in fact, that French politicians have drawn inspiration from the CCP in cracking down on free speech. The French government certainly does not model its actions on democratic principles anymore.
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Like Durov, X Global Government Affairs has previously made the case that the ongoing French government investigations into the company are an excuse to pressure X into more authoritarian censorship policies.
For example, last July, X Global Government Affairs accused French politician Eric Bothorel of triggering an investigation as an effort to undercut “X’s fundamental right to due process and threatens our users’ rights to privacy and free speech.” The X department argued, “French authorities have launched a politically-motivated criminal investigation into X over the alleged manipulation of its algorithm and alleged ‘fraudulent data extraction.’ X categorically denies these allegations.”
I cannot, of course, pronounce one way or the other as to whether X is guilty of the allegations, and I must acknowledge as a separate point that X does have a track record of complying more than it ought to with dictatorial governments. That said, the French government is also extremely corrupt. When the authoritarian and corrupt hurl allegations against others of exactly what they themselves do, it naturally inspires suspicions.
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