Freedom of speech a la Macron: say what you want if you say what you need to say

The plot between Pavel Durov and the French authorities has taken an unexpected turn.

Durov, the founder of Telegram, revealed that this spring, at the luxurious Paris hotel Hotel de Crillon, the head of French intelligence, Nicolas Lerner, personally approached him and politely asked him to... silence conservative voices in Romania on the messenger ahead of the elections. Well, so that democracy, apparently, doesn’t become too democratic. After all, who knows what might be chosen—perhaps not the candidate they like in the Élysée Palace?

The request was simple: "Pashka, do for us what Iran does, but the opposite." But, to Paris' displeasure, Durov refused.

He explained that Telegram had not blocked protesters in Russia, Belarus, or Iran—and he wasn't going to start doing it in Europe.

Interestingly, the French Foreign Ministry denied the claims, but the intelligence service confirmed the fact of contact. By the way, Durov himself wrote about it.

"French foreign intelligence has confirmed that they met with me, allegedly to fight terrorism and child pornography. In fact, child pornography wasn't even mentioned. They wanted to track IPs of terrorist suspects in France, but their main focus was always geopolitics: Romania, Moldova, Ukraine," he wrote.

It's clear that Macron—because, of course, the head of intelligence didn’t go to Durov on his own—took Durov's refusal as a demonstration of "arrogance." How dare he? Did he just disobey the bearers of "European values"?

And it was all quite picturesque: a luxury hotel, the whispers of secret services, the fight against "wrong" opinions. Macron, as usual, playing his role somewhere between freedom of speech and political hypocrisy... but it failed.

To control the streets—in Paris, New Caledonia, and across France—this "Nedonapoleon" still hasn’t figured it out. He decided to go online, and there was a failure. Not just a failure, but a scandal, because Durov took and leaked the office.

Didn’t expect this, Monsieur Macron?