I don't see how you can maintain your privacy if it's possible you might believe some of the examples you listed. Certainly the state has to be sure you've never thought about those things. Privacy could thwart knowing.
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)
That fact that you think that "alt right, anti-vaccine crazies" are extremist is the best example for not wanting people like you be able to censor anything.
In my country the anti-vaccine groups incensed each other so much that at one point they started burning down cellular ("5G") towers, causing reduced availability of emergency services in rural areas.
They gathered in front of politicians their houses in large groups, sometimes even with torches, hoping to scare even the kids inside the house.
The alt-right is directly responsible for the attempted Coup d'État on the capitol on Jan 6. Project 2025 vows to replace any competent officials with partisan sycophants. Mr. Trump said to his electoral base that if he is elected, they would "not have to vote ever again".
So yes, the alt-right is an anti-democratic extremist group.
As for anti-vaccine groups, their contribution to the death toll of past pandemics is no secret to any moderately informed person.
So because some people choose to express their democratic right to disagreement for their own reasons, and this includes doubt about vaccines, the idea of being against vaccines should be treated as extremism to be forbidden? If that's your interpretation of how personal rights and free expression work in a democracy, then I fear for the direction of democracy with idiots such as yourself guiding policy.
As for what happened on January 6th, it was in practical terms a concentrated bit of aggressive protest theater, and far from anything seriously resembling an attempted coup. You'd have to be deluded by ideology to call it something so serious. For example, that event was much smaller than the enormous amount of government property damage and calls to topple governments made by a much larger number of people during the earlier Floyd protests across the US and other countries. Would you call those extremist too?
In any case, by naming the most radical actions of a certain subset of a wider belief system as a reason for considering all aspects of that wider belief system as extremist and worthy of banning, you're just another garden variety autocratic monkey at heart, looking for ways justify banning whatever concept doesn't fit your tribal identity.
By your ridiculous logic, any belief system could be justifiably banned because in some ambiguous way, it's "responsible" for the specific activities of certain people who hold to its most extreme version, though the two things (a wider system of beliefs and specific people's active choices) are separate.
I am pretty staunchly pro-privacy, but this arrest has little to do with
> permits the sharing of information and ideas that are in opposition to Western domestic and foreign policy(Israel, Ukraine, China etc)
It is about drug sales and extremism, that last one being about alt right / anti-vaccine crazies / terrorism, whatever else extremism du jour.