Pavel Durov: 'Child Protection' as Cover for Online Speech Control

to force people to verify their age in order to access social media. They needed to protect children. Privately, though, they offered a different explanation. In their submission to the High Court of England published last year, the British government said that the principal part of the Online Safety Act had nothing to do with protecting children. Instead, they said, and I quote, the main part of the Online Safety Act was aimed at capturing large platforms with significant influence over public discourse. Now, let's think about it. Now, they used protection of children as a pretext where, in fact, they wanted... more control over political speech online. And this is very sad, because protecting children is exactly the same justification that has been used in countless other cases by authoritarian regimes over the course of the last century. Why? Because once somebody says child protection, all of a sudden it triggers very ancient, very deep parts of our brain, who would be against protecting children? Everybody is scared for the future of their offspring. Once somebody says we need to protect the children, they're in danger, it completely bypasses logic, it bypasses debate, it bypasses rationality. All of a sudden, people are ready to give up everything and authoritarian regimes were able to smuggle all kinds of repressive legislation under the guise of protecting children. Now, the same justification is being used by the European Commission to push for a set of surveillance laws, the so -called chat control, the chat control initiative. For five years, the European Commission has been trying to force a new set of laws that would require every messaging app to implement a backdoor to their encryption. So that everything that we share online, every private message, every private photo that we sent using apps like Telegram or WhatsApp, or any other, it would be automatically monitored. And if the system is not, it would be automatically monitored.