I'm turning 41, but I don't feel like celebrating | Hacker News Reader

I'm turning 41, but I don't feel like celebrating

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72 pointspr337h4m123 comments

The freedom interlude was a byproduct of the end of the cold war. We lived a rare period of trust between people across the world. Now we need to find a new framework beyond national trust but I don't have ideas.

Durov himself lives in an unfree country

What unfree county is that? He certainly doesn't live in Russia if that is what you are alluding to.

He lives in the UAE.

I think for the past couple of years he lives in France. By force, so it's not very straight to recognize it as a free or not.

He mentions on his recent Lex Fridman podcast episode[1] that he lives in Dubai, U.A.E. He expressed fear about France's actions against him.

1. https://youtu.be/qjPH9njnaVU

He does have a French passport (in addition to his other passports) but does not live there. This may be the source of the confusion.

I mean the arrest. But as I just learned [1] he is being allowed to make periodic travels to Dubai since recently. So things got better for him now, but that's just since July 2025. Before that he was physically staying in France since August 2024, which I would call as "living" as it's the place where he spent most of his time.

[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250619-france-soften...

A free country... if you're wealthy enough!

Is there a free one?

Most countries in the EU seem quite free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

Let's take a second to remember that Pavel Durov is the CEO of a messaging company that doesn't end-to-end encrypt chats by default and does not provide a way to end-to-end encrypt group chats

He covered it in the interview in a quite reasonable way. E2E encryption, especially if forward secrecy is a requirement is incompatible with many important features: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qjPH9njnaVU&t=9583

You probably don't realize it, but multi-device support, group chats of tens of thousands of users, channels with millions of users and comments of said users. Attachments and history and search. And then a whole infrastructure for running bots and processing payments. And proxies to fight blocking attempts. All of these are either highly problematic or computationally intensive and practically infeasible with E2E on.

Otherwise, someone would have taken the opportunity and reimplemented Telegram on top of homomorphic encryption /s.

End to end could still be default for 1-1 chats. Multi device support turns this into a small group chat but it is doable (Wire did it this way afaik; I think Signal does too).

Small groups could likewise be supported.

I take the point that for large groups client fan out of the double ratchet doesn't scale. We now have MLS but we didn't. There's also an argument of how can you really keep a secret in an open group of a few thousand people.

But on a small, "personal" level, e2e could absolutely be done. Not doing so is a choice, one that conveniently ends with almost everyone's chats stored on servers somewhere.

I would go so far as to say I bet telegram is a goldmine for TLAs.

> We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech. By betraying the legacy of our ancestors....

Pavel Durov's ancestors include a Red Army soldier who helped pave the way for Soviet control of Eastern Europe. While the content of his message about losing privacy has merit, the appeal to "tradition" and "forefathers" seems like he's speaking to a particular kind of audience.

It is weird that all he seems to do is criticize western democracies and push NFTs. Who is hawking NFTs in a year that isn't 2020?

Telegram and Durov have a different idea of NFT than you, I guess.

For them, it's more about enabling micropayments. So far, the only successful micropayments system was advertising, and it's a real shame we couldn't build better.

Reaching the end of the same decade, and sadly share the same opinion, worse seeing the population of my country voting for what we got away from 1974 and what my parents generation had to endure.

Let's take a second to remember that Pavel Durov is the CEO of a messaging company that doesn't end-to-end encrypt chats by default, and does not even offer a way to have end-to-end encrypted groups.

I share Durov’s disappointment about where the internet is heading.

But I think it’s hypocritical to talk about freedom of speech issues in Western Europe while ignoring similar or worse restrictions in China, Russia, or Dubai, where he lives.

It’s similar to Musk’s approach — when Twitter is shut down in Brazil, it’s a freedom of speech violation, but having a Tesla factory in China suddenly makes that problem disappear there.

Well, Russia has basically never had freedom of speech, except for a brief period in the 1990s, so it contributes nothing to his thesis in the tweet that "once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures."

If he had written that Western Europe is moving toward China’s model, I would have had no questions about his tweet and would have fully supported it.

As I understand it, Durov doesn’t agree with your statement — you can check point 5 of his 2014 manifesto [1]

[1] https://globalvoices.org/2014/03/13/pavel-durovs-seven-reaso...

>2014

That was before the Kremlin fully launched its repressive measures against the Internet, and before he was forced to leave Russia for refusing to cooperate with the authorities.

Already after 2012 street protests in Moscow.

Makes it weird that he's choosing to live in a never-free country maybe though (as an alternative to living in the other seldom-free country in which he is a citizen).

I view it differently. China and Russia are lost causes and are fundamentally authoritarian. Western democracies or countries that claim to constitutionally protect free speech (like Brazil) can be held to a higher standard. Not doing so leads to them ultimately becoming authoritarian.

I’m more focused on the situation from Musk’s point of view, not yours. Maybe your view is less controversial. But I don’t think Musk sees China and Russia as failed states. He’s said many positive things about both countries.

Stateless individuals shouldn't lecture us on values.

Hypocrisy is a virtue. It gives you the strength to batter the enemy while remaining untouched yourself.

Related: Lex Fridman just dropped a 4 hour podcast with Durov

https://youtu.be/qjPH9njnaVU?si=_pkEi-SDML08AASJ

Two intelligence assets talking to each other. Both have quite similar backgrounds with dubious credentials. A history of lying and obfuscation. I wouldn't trust anything Fridman or Durov say.

I don't know how anyone sits through ten minutes of Lex speaking let alone multiple hours.

It's a steep learning curve, I concur.

Try to sit through the 5 hours of interview with Carmack if you are a coder, or the interview with Aella, if you are more into humanities.

These two are his crown jewels, IMO.

Awwww, so cute. Here's a cookie.

you don't have to listen - get google gemini to make a transcript & summarize key points.

Pavel Durov cannot be trusted. He has built his life on lies, created an opaque, highly complex network of companies, and developed a relationship with the Russian regime that is full of inconsistencies, among other things. For starters, he claimed for years that Telegram's headquarters were in Berlin, Germany, when they never were.

He, himself? I agree. He's a snake in the grass. His message is 100% correct though.

No, it isn't. There are factual errors in his tweet like others pointed out.

PS: He is even lying about his own body.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tjournal_refugees/comments/1k3lc02/...

Lol lets not even talk about his comical toupee.

https://archive.is/mHEE4

> and ultimately biological.

Was fully nodding along, and this confused me. What is that supposed to mean?

That’s the thing about dog whistles, they’re full of plausible deniability.

people refuse to acknowledge the truth and instead attack the messenger -- how is that 'elevating' the conversation? it's just pure propaganda.

https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...

There is plenty of evidence -- anyone who saays otherwise tell me and i will provide it unless hn bans me yet again for attempting to spread the truth.

for germany -- look up CJ Hopkins. free speech is a farce in europe and has been for decades.

>The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets.

Except they are not. Googling I came across about five, mostly calling for asylum seekers accommodation to be burned down. Arson was actually disapproved of even before twitter.

Durov's home country is murdering thousands in Ukraine though in the hope they they'll bend the knee to the invaders. I think that sort of stuff is more a threat to freedom.

I agree that we're doomed, but I think the key decision that doomed us was made deep in the NSA in the 1980s, when they decided to bury the idea of Capability Based Security, and just let MS-DOS and Unix take over computing after the rise of the microcomputer. They had discovered and then fixed the problem with ambient authority after it arose during the Viet Nam conflict, giving rise to Multilevel Security.

When the Microcomputers came, and everyone ignored mainframes, they decided to step back, and let everyone have their foolishness. It was far easier for their jobs if the let operating systems that trusted everything take over the market. The Soviets copied our moves, and made themselves vulnerable. They figured they would retain the institutional knowledge and wisdom, keeping their own internal systems secure by design.

But they didn't plan on retirements and changes of administration, and the end of the cold war. Once that shock happened, they didn't reconsider. They didn't reconsider again when the world became networked, and connectivity for almost everything became persistent. There were multiple points at which they could have changed course, quietly pushed systems that were secure by design, but they apparently haven't.

So now we're in a world where you can't trust anything newer than an IBM XT with dual floppy drives. Where firmware can be updated with persistent worms, making it permanently untrustworthy. Into this world, we all carry spying devices in our pockets and purses, that can be repurposed by any intelligence agency, or sufficiently motivated person for that matter, into tools of oppression.

I think that a sufficient shock might pull us back into rationality, and cause us to seek sane computing strategies we can trust, but I don't give that good odds at present, 5% or less.

We don't have privacy, and you'd have to be an old fool to actually speak your mind these days. We're falling right into the thing we feared the most when I was a kid, a repressive Soviet style oligarchy where you can't trust anyone. You especially can't trust any computing devices.

It should be noted that Durov does not criticize Russia, his country of citizenship and the center of much of his userbase.

The Russian internet is far more controlled than the Western internet, with penalties up to and including arrest and death for expressing the wrong views. Russia also is actively invading Europe and sponsoring vast network of troll accounts which poison the discourse on the internet in Western countries.

This does not make his argument incorrect but it is worth keeping the context in mind before getting too cynical about western systems. That cynicism is one the explicit goals of Russian propaganda.

> That cynicism is one the explicit goals of Russian propaganda.

I don’t need Russia to tell me to be cynical of the western political situation.

Well, do you? Where does the cynicism against the political situation come from? I think europes reality is much better, than the poisoned discourse makes us believe.

I am in Germany and I don’t need troll farms to poison my worldview. It’s enough to go to the local school where swimming pool is closed, because there is no money. It’s enough to go to all hands meeting at work to get new location in best cost country presented. It’s enough to try finding specialized doctor and realizing, that my public health insurance allows me to see the doctor in April 2026. I just don’t think it’s the way it should be in a first world country. Obviously something does not work despite people actively voting in every election.

Yes, all of this is true. But it is also true that the poisoned discourse makes things look much worse than they really are.

To reframe it: changing these bad situations is easier than it seems. It’s not easy, but many people feel as if change were impossible.

I believe this feeling of hopelessness is one of the main reasons why political and financial fascists can rise. They yell that the world is falling apart and that they have the (final) solution. Russian bot farms amplify this narrative, helping massively to weaken democratic societies.

This is an information war and Europe has been losing it for about 10 to 20 years.

I don’t know if any change is possible. I definitely can’t repair school, nor make the Deutsche Bahn trains run on time. Health and retirement “insurance” are getting more and more expensive every year. The single thing I can try is to accumulate some wealth despite government squeezing me out. Then get some car and avoid dysfunctional public transportation. Pay doctors by myself and not through failing public health insurance. Buy rental real estate and don’t wait anything from failing retirement system.

There are just too many objective things that can be well measured. Grocery shopping bills, utility bills, payslips. Even job ads for hardware developers like me. I quit television as a teen and newspapers during 2014 Ukraine war. The west makes ruzzian troll farms easy life.

Does democracy still work? I often provoke German colleagues and ask who voted for 5 millions new immigrants into welfare system during last 10 years. Nobody gave me positive answer. So what’s happening? Voters obviously get what they don’t want. Nobody voted for falling apart infrastructure. I started thinking about offroad suspension and tires for my car. I regularly visit my older neighbors and have a chat, old people see the same. And have statistics. They remember the years when there was no train at all. When the train run every 4 hours, when the train came every 30 minutes and when chaos started 2 decades ago. Maybe there are enough internal factors that weaken so called democratic societies and ruzzian trolls are only very minor factor. Deindustrialization in Germany can be seen on plain sight and well paid positions will never come back: https://group.mercedes-benz.com/company/news/mercedes-benz-v...

Edit: probably wrong link. Sprinter production goes to Poland. Apparently German production is too expensive.

Germany just has terrible demographics. Fill a country with old people and you get Germany, of course things are falling apart. It doesn’t mean democracy doesn’t work, it just means the elderly are voting for higher and higher pensions at the cost of everyone working.

Well, apparently Russia needs it, I received at least 3 propaganda messages from him globally sent on Telegram.

I'm Danish, chat control has it's origin in a proposal from my politicians. It's been revoked because there was no support. The major reason it was revoked was because of the strong German stance against it. It's currently backfiring in the hands of the politicians who suggested it. In Denmarj we seem to often be on the wrong side of internet freedom, and I think we should all criticize that. Only it's not black and white, because we're also one of the most pro-free-speech countries in the world. I know the world is often turned black and white on the internet, but if you're always painting the black, then that doesn't help the debate.

I think that is what Pavel does. Look at how he mentions chat control, but not that it was turned down and revoked. Then directly goes on to criticize Germany (who shut down chat control) for being anti freedom. He doesn't say anything that is wrong. Due to their history, Germany does not allow you to say anything you want about their politicians, deny history or praise nazism. It's that same history that makes Germany such strong proponents for privacy though, because they've lived the Surveillance state before it was cool. That is what has turned Germany is a privacy haven on par with Sweden, but where does Pavel ever mention that?

For that is the main issue with people like Pavel. It's not that the message is wrong. The internet has become mainly controlled by a couple of SoMe companies which are controlled by the aristocracy. It's that he polarizes it, but only against the west. I get why he wouldn't criticize Russia even if he wanted to, but he's certainly not walking the walk, is he? The fact that he spreads the message on X just makes it even more hypocritical. (If you think that part about X is me being "woke", please keep in mind that Twitter banned Trump.)

Exactly and what he writes about Germany is wrong:

> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet

No you can criticize all you want. You just can’t insult them. Free speech is different in Germany than in the US. Insulting people isn’t covered by free speech.

Whether or not that is a good thing is up for debate, but Durov’s statement is plain wrong.

Sounds like a recipe for the powerful dehumanizing people using polite words and those being dehumanized being handcuffed in the range of legal responses they can make in return.

At the end of the day, powerful people will still have the upper hand anywhere in the world, you're bringing up a red herring.

It's not like by going for an ad hominem you automatically win back the argument.

No, but denying people the ability to express part of the human condition under reasonable circumstances is cruel.

Aren't you grasping at straws, at this point? The rule says: don't insult.

Is it so hard to verbally destroy a person's stance on something without insulting the person itself?

It might be if the other side is allowed to insult.

Are we talking about kids in a backyard here or about "powerful people", presumably engaged in a political struggle?

Has insulting anyone ever stopped anything?

The answer is, unfortunately, yes. The problem is the court of public opinion can easily be swayed by insulting someone, and if that someone can not insult back, that's a political instrument that gives asymmetrical power to the current rulers.

I'm guess I'm too European for this discussion to make a lot of sense.

This shit was literally invented in Europe.

> No one can say that your propaganda is too crude or low or brutal, or that it is not decent enough, for those are not the relevant criteria. Its purpose is not to be decent, or gentle, or weak, or modest; it is to be successful.

From https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb54...

This discussion has officially fallen off any reasonable rails.

When you are some random person on social media, you aren't likely gonna be debating a policymaker or talking head. Not being allowed to express anger without risking legal penalties is cruel. I stand by that.

> powerful people will still have the upper hand anywhere

So just give up on trying to keep the powerful in check with laws?

No? Then what are you saying? Why not consider how this notion of banning "insult" is guaranteed to be abused?

The CEO of that healthcare company probably thought the same thing.

Yeah, that sure showed those greedy healthcare CEOs in the US. The US almost managed to get universal healthcare out of it.

Sarcasm aside, what kind of argument is that? And how is it related to what I'm saying?

> Yeah, that sure showed those greedy healthcare CEOs in the US.

Yeah, it scared the hell out of them: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unitedhealth-spent-1-7-millio...

... avoiding losing C-level executives could very quickly become an exercise in corporate cost avoidance, as the expenses of additional layers of security cost more than a change in corporate behavior... where paying more attention to customers reduces shareholder risk in executive turnover.

Those costs where in the millions while UnitedHealth profits are in the tens of <<b>>illions.

This belief could be characterized as "misguided optimism".

Plus is has 0 connection to any kind of discussion about "freeze peach".

You just need a little imagination.

> You just can’t insult them

Oh those snowflake politicians! When do they grow thick skin? /s

Nor does he criticise the UAE where he moved to, where of course he gave up free speech for tax benefits. I don’t blame him of course, I’d be terrified to criticise the government if I lived there too.

yup, he can't. He'd be thrown in jail or deported.

Interesting choice of a place to live for someone who is prioritizing freedom of expression?

Durov left Russia in 2014 after he refused fo cooperate with the authorities (they asked to hand over personal info about pro-Ukrainian groups on VK), saying:

>Unfortunately, it's impossible to run an online business in this country. I'm afraid there's no way back for me - especially after I publicly refused to cooperate with the authorities.

What I'm seeing here is that for a lot of liberal Russians (including Durov), the West was this ideal, beacon of freedom, and many are disappointed to see it moving in the same direction as Russia. For Russia, it's obvious that free speech doesn't exist there, nothing new to say.

РЗН

And recently it was discovered that he regulary visited russia after 2014 and met there with government officials. Including having the Telegram blocking removed after one such visit

Pavel can't be trusted in any way. Russia is at war with Europe, russians are living in a bloody dictatorship and there is zero freedom of speech in Russia. Yet his tweet is only about western democracies in Europe - exactly what you would expect from a Putin puppet.

He also has French citizenship. Perhaps he cares about defending those values where they are still viable. That makes him more trustworthy not less.

Oh nice, so i'm sure he is defending our freedom by living in France as a french citizen like the rest of us where freedom of speech actually exists fur russian guys like him? But i forgot, he chose instead just another dictatorship in the middle east. I guess that makes him even more trustworthy.

The fact that Putin reversed his stance and Telegram isn't banned in Russia anymore is all you need to know on his values.

It's covered in the interview. The Russian state backed off when they figured that the only way to ban Telegram is to also break large pieces of the country's digital infrastructure, because Telegram was using Cloudflare, Google Cloud, AWS, Hetzner address ranges for its proxies to evade blocking.

Now, Telegram is also an important part of military communication in Russia. Probably not that often for the chain-of-command, but there are dozens of channels that cover frontline news and war in details, and these somewhat independent media outlets are as important to the Russian government as they are to the CIA.

I never believed that, there's too many coincidence with his visit to Russia and the Russian state investment in Telegram at the same time.

IIRC, Roskomsvoboda had a project to figure out the banned IPs and ranges, and mitigations were widely discussed on habr.ru and specialized forums. The whole story unrolled in real-time and publicly. I don't think there's any doubt about its veracity.

I don't think Russians are the group English speakers get the most propaganda from.

i haven't celebrated a birthday in decades. i think prince or the artist formerly known as is right. you were born on a day years ago, that's not the same day as the yearly rotation around the sun even if it matches silly marks on a calender.

I agree with every word Pavel put there - and what is most threatening ... we are about to lose it.

Why?

Normies.

They were 'played' in C19 time - and they will be 'played' next time ... and EVERY next time.

There are just too many IGNORANT people out there that trust TV.

This is Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. And he’s totally correct. The Internet was much better before the 2000s and the social media era. And when the people who remember it aren’t around, those remaining won’t have any idea that they’re missing something.

He’s also totally correct in calling out the obvious lunge towards authoritarianism from European democracies - this must be stopped immediately:

> Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).

> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.

We're also running out of people who know and care that you used to be able to buy straight from a publisher, own, play offline with privacy, and resell games on an open platform without Steam as a DRM/rent-seeking middleman.

Point 'em to Gog and itch.io if you get a chance

Yet he is also one of the riders of apocalypse. Techbros who only applied rules that suited them and abused everything else. It's one thing if we had some mythical true freedom fighters, or guys from Signal, against The State, but if it's people like him, Zuckerberg etc. then it gets much harder to defend anything they do. It is important to understand that 'the lunge towards authoritarianism' is directly caused by this.

> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet.

This is not correct as far as I know. If Germany is persecuting someone for something written on the internet, that something is much worse than criticism. Words should still have meaning.

> The Internet was much better before the 2000s

An embarrassing fiction, it was junk. More people are on VPNs now than were on the internet pre-2000

It's true there were ideas and principals in a wild west the younger generation will never know was the default. You could go out and have a battle with Injun's or see a lynching but it was 99.9% dust and hard work herding cows.

The internet now is a megacity, everything is amazing, there are roving gang wars to little hobbyists and anything else you can imagine.

> He’s also totally correct in calling out the obvious lunge towards authoritarianism

Yes Pavel and this is 100% correct.

China banned VPNs effectively, this will come to the West next. If the US falls there is no where to VPN to.

>> He’s also totally correct in calling out the obvious lunge towards authoritarianism

>Yes Pavel and this is 100% correct.

a lunge he happily helped support with telegram and vkontakte as long as the money rolled it. Poor rich guy.

There's relentless distractions. Being relentlessly harrassed by so many things trying to steal your attention and time.

The Internet truly was better when people had more control over their own experience in it. Now the modern equivalent of pop-up ads are on every blog begging you to sign up for their newsletter and you're severely restricted in how you can even interact with the handful of popular websites leftover.

Some things are better now, sure. But some are definitely worse with the control over information exposure that we've lost.

Germany has always had strange (bad) laws about insulting people. It's literally nothing to do with the internet. You are betraying your ignorance by saying they "must be stopped"—they've been around since the country was founded.

I think it’s questionable to trust the guy who founded Telegram this much.

The opinion given about Germany leaves out a lot of the nuance. I think that Germany is taking a unique approach that actually seems to make sense:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-pros...

I would argue that the American approach to a more absolute form of freedom of speech, plus the manipulative potential of the internet, plus psychological differences that exist when humans socialize online compared to in person has made a really negative cocktail of societal harm.

The USA is sliding into authoritarianism in part because it explicitly allows grifters to spread outright lies and slander via their corporate platforms and there’s no recourse because of the first amendment.

News outlets like Fox News don’t have to even attempts to be news in their concept, they can go to court and claim that their programming is an opinion entertainment show and spread information they know to be lies. They’ve only really been caught in this scam legally once in paying out the Dominion civil defamation suit settlement and they only had to do that because they were defaming a specific company.

The US elected a literal internet troll as president. And that’s not a good thing.

I think there is something admirable in the approach Germany is taking, and as long as it is implemented well it is absolutely possible to balance free expression with protecting society from vitriol.

Can we stop conflating free internet and exchange of ideas with stupid closed platforms that steal your data?

You're the billionaire owner of Telegram. If you cared about these things you'd sell and invest in open standards or making our current standards suck less or be easier to use.

Cry me a river.

"Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet

Bull. Shit. If you break the existing laws, by insulting or slandering someone, you might have to face the consequences.

But I guess it is easy to point the finger at Germany and conjure the specter of the fascists if you live in Dubai, come from Russia, and created 2 of the biggest troll-mills ever. Would not want to rattle the cage too much, would we.

Same for his suggestion the 1000s of people are in prison for tweeting - there are people who are jailed for malicious communications but that includes terrorism and a few others things that are far more serious than simply presenting an opinion on a website.

> anyone who dares to criticize officials

> by insulting or slandering someone

That's a bit of a straw man isn't it?

The German government makes it very easy to point fingers at them: The German minister of economics and "vice president" (vice chancellor) had so much free time and capacity to sue more than 800 citizens! https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1493232/umfra...

The vice president of a G7 country suing old men because they called him a numbnut on the internet is ridiculous.

no, its not. He exercised his right to not be insulted and slandered - same as if those people would have walked up to him and talked to him directly.

Especially if you see the hate that was sprewed at him at every single post, news, update or whatever, i completley understand. This has nothing to do with criticizing someone - Habeck actually has a good track record of sitting down with other people and talking with them, but stuff like death threats.

More background here at politico https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-robert-habeck-files-... this were massive attacks leading up to the european election not people unhappy with "Ze Greens".

Also, on the "old man calling him an idiot”:

<< Habeck authorized prosecutors to pursue the case for the insult against him by issuing what in German is known as a "Strafantrag." However, this is different from an individually-submitted criminal complaint to law enforcement authorities known as a "Strafanzeige," and could indicate that law enforcement had first invited or asked Habeck to press the charges. Prosecutors did not specify who had approached who first.

So, not Habeck going after him, but simply saying that its ok to pursue the inquiry.

<< The Bavaria resident is also accused of posting Nazi-era imagery and language earlier in 2024. According to prosecutors, this post may have violated German laws against the incitement of ethnic or religious hatred.

Yeah, that "old guy" seems like a real treat and not at all like an asshole right-wing dumbnut.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...

The old guy was also not convicted, something the right-wingers found super cool.

"The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets."

Who?? What's he talking about?

Probably referring to Lucy Connoly[1] and the general numbers of speech arrests on the UK[2]. "Imprisoning thousands" may be an exaggeration though.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yl7p4l11po

[2] https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...

It's not actually true, of course - unless by "thousands" you mean "one or two", and by "for their tweets" you mean "for actively inciting serious violence in the middle of a riot".

But it's a fairly common far right talking point, and similar claims come up a lot in certain types of anti-Western propaganda. Perhaps Durov could have been influenced by that?

Common misunderstandings are that there was no control over the internet and that anonymity was for protecting freedom of expression of the individuals.

The difference is that what once was covert in the West is now out in the open. Anonymity enabled the troll culture, famously exploited by any and all bad faith actors in their favor. Control in terms of surveillance on metadata level is just a manner of having enough endpoints at your disposal for a nation state actor.

It was a nice illusion and the wake up is kind of harsh.

> Anonymity enabled the troll culture

Anonymity enabled honesty and free expression. FTFY.

That is indeed the paradox. What sometimes made true community possible, sometimes made exploitation easier. The line between the two is thin, and we’ve all seen both sides of it.

I'm old enough to remember the internet before the WWW and yes, anonymity enabled the troll culture (among other things). Honesty and free expression didn't require anonymity because people weren't being constantly monitored or having their every pronouncement judged (by the mostly anonymous). Yes, there were lots of flame-wars, but folks by and large had the gumption to hold their name to their positions.

* I may be wearing rose-tinted glasses. It's been a very long time since I'd spend 4 hours a day reading and replying on various Usenet groups.

You don't need anonymity so much until certain things show up: other anonymous people, commercial bulk data aggregation, bullying subcultures, blending of real life with the online world, political intolerance.

Unfortunately, I don't see a path back to the kind of internet where we don't need anonymity so much.

Anonymity was important back then to, and I was a strident defender of anon.penet.fi (look this up if you're not familiar). The problem is that what worked well as an option with a degree of persistence created its own set of problems when industrialized. We are not imho better off with fully anonymous swarms or the increasingly default situation of website ownership being hidden from the public, both of which have enabled the automation of abuse, misinformation, slop content and so on. Over the last 30-40 years internet communication/communities have gone from relatively high trust and levels of user participation/democracy toward zero trust and an extremely bimodal power distribution which has produced an excess of toxicity and adversarial behavior. I blame hacking/phreaking culture to a certain extent, because openness and information exchange valorized in that culture are also accompanies with a lot of drama and personal backbiting.

> Honesty and free expression didn't require anonymity because people weren't being constantly monitored or having their every pronouncement judged

This feels revisionist. The internet was almost entirely anonymous. Whether it was “required” or not is irrelevant. People could be honest and not fear censorship.

> Anonymity enabled the troll culture

You will be blown away by stuff people post at eachother on facebook, the site where you use your real name

Consider;

a. Not all people using Facebook are using their real name,

and

b. Not all Facebook accounts are real people

You have a good point. Some people have anonymous accounts on facebook and that means that my old neighbor did not publicly surprise her husband by announcing that she was polyamorous in a status update

Real names? I have an old novelty account (not used) which still sends me updates via email from the family of the same name as the ready made meals company I was making fun of.

At the same time you are completely right! Troll culture has enabled an era of unhinged communication. Many people have lost the little decency they had. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not immune to it.

Yeah my point isn’t really about troll accounts. They exist but that doesn’t have anything to do with the amount of crazy stuff people post under their real names on facebook. Like I could say “imgur, the place where you post dogs” and that would be accurate even if somebody saw pictures of a cat on it

> Anonymity enabled the troll culture

And so what if it did? That's the price we collectively pay for a free internet.

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