Passengers of the Titanic actually didn't want to leave the ship for almost 2 hours after it hit the iceberg. People thought the Titanic was unsinkable. Lifeboats left half empty. Only the last half hour people started to panic, but by that time it was already too late. Not enough lifeboats, nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. Now, I came here today to tell you that we find ourselves in a similar predicament. Our ship has already hit the iceberg. We have already started to sink without even realizing it. And I'm talking about the ship of our personal freedoms. Personal freedoms have been eroded everywhere in the world, almost without exception. I know this from personal experience. I've been running large social media platforms for almost 20 years, exactly 20 years. And I witnessed firsthand which methods governments use to suppress our freedoms and take away our basic rights. I've seen all the tricks, the PR tricks, the legal tricks, the political tricks, the manipulations, the official excuses. I've become an expert at this. And the thing that bothers me most today is that some of the same tricks that have been employed by authoritarian regimes in places like Russia or China and Iran are now being also used in some Western countries.
But maybe I'm exaggerating, right? Let's look at the facts. Thousands of people are getting arrested every year in the United Kingdom for social media posts. You say something politically incorrect online, you may end up being fined or spend some time in prison. In Germany, the largest country in the European Union, people get arrested and persecuted for insulting politicians online. Thousands of people every year. You call a politician a bigot or a thief online and you can serve up to 3 years in prison. So now people are afraid to use their real identities. People stop using their real names when they make comments online. And the European Commission is pushing for a new measure to require that all social media users present their IDs before they can access social media sites. Their official justification is child protection. They want to ban social media services for everybody under 16. And for that, they need people to verify their age by presenting their ID.
But what will happen if social media sites are banned for teenagers? Will it bring harm or good? Actually, we know the answer to this question because it has already been tried. This experiment has already been conducted in Russia. Russia banned Telegram, the largest social media platform at the time, for all of its citizens because we refused to comply with their demands for mass surveillance and censorship. However, 95% of Russian teenagers still use Telegram every month. How? They use VPNs. They bypass the entire thing. And there's very little you can do with VPNs. Russia is trying very hard. They have invested billions in trying to fight VPNs. They're banning hundreds of VPNs every month using IP addresses and traffic patterns. They even installed surveillance hardware into every data sensor of every internet provider in the country, trying to monitor all the traffic and trying to prevent people from using VPNs. And they failed. Despite all this effort, they failed. The majority of the population of Russia still uses Telegram. The majority of the population of Iran still uses Telegram as well, despite the fact that Iran has been blocking Telegram for all of its citizens since 2018. So, we know exactly what happens when you ban social media for part of your population. They just switch to VPN. The problem is, once we force teenagers and children to use VPNs, all kinds of nasty, illegal, fringe content gets unlocked for them. Certain websites that have been banned years ago all of a sudden become available again. So, the children end up being in a larger danger than they are now.
And you can ask yourself, if this policy is destined to fail, obviously we see how it played out in other countries, why is the European Commission and the United Kingdom and Australia and Canada and some other countries pushing for this measure? Is it incompetence? Maybe. But the British government seems to have given an answer to this question. Publicly, they promoted the Online Safety Act as a set of laws to protect children, 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. They used protection of children as a pretext, when in fact they wanted more control over political speech online. And this is very sad because protecting children is exactly the 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, debate, 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 initiative. For 5 years, the European Commission has been trying to force a new set of laws that would require every messaging app to implement a back door 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 would be automatically monitored. And if the system detects that we are trying to do something illegal, it alerts the authorities. The justification here again is child protection.
And this has been tried on the European level and also on the national level. The French government has been trying to pass a similar law that would basically mandate mass surveillance on the national level. The French Senate has approved this law. It was stuck on the level of National Assembly, but the French Senate thought it was a reasonable and a good idea to enact mass surveillance. So, this shows how dangerous it is and how close we are even here in Europe to a stage where we end up being monitored. Now, the French used slightly different justification. They said, 'We need to combat crime. We need to do something about terrorism. We need to do something about drug trafficking. And that's why we need to spy on you. For your own protection, you have to give up your essential right to privacy.' And this again has been tried countless times in the history of humanity where we or different nations throughout history have been offered an exchange: give up some of your essential liberty in exchange for some temporary safety. And this deal, this offer is always a scam and it always turned out to be a scam. You Benjamin Franklin who said, 'Those who are willing to give up their essential liberty for some temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.'
And we see that. We see that in counter spaces. Ask people living in Russia or living in Iran whether they feel safer today than they felt 10-15 years ago. They definitely lost a lot of their freedoms in the last decade or two. Have they gained any safety? I doubt that. Once you allow law enforcement, police have access to your messages, you will not prevent crime. The criminals will be the first to switch onto other tools, more secure. They will use VPNs. They will use private secret apps. They can even write their own encrypted messaging app now in the age of AI. The criminals will be fine. It will be the law-abiding citizens who will be put in danger. It will be the ordinary people that will have their privacy taken away from them. Not the criminals. Well, how do I know that? Maybe I'm inventing things. Again, from my experience in Russia 15 years ago when I was still running VK, the largest social network in Russia at the time, we started to receive weird data requests from the Russian police. You know, back then VK actually disclosed in some cases contents of private messages. Unlike Telegram today, which doesn't disclose it ever, VK, back in the day, did that, provided there was an official justification. And we started to notice something weird. Something was off about these data requests coming from the Russian police. We realized that the people who were included in these investigations had nothing to do with the crimes that were described there. So, we started to investigate the investigators. And we came to a conclusion pretty fast that the police was corrupt. They were trying to access private messages of innocent people in order to then blackmail them and sell their private data to criminals. They used it for harassment and other things. So, you could say, 'Okay, you had this traumatizing experience in Russia, but surely nothing of the kind can happen in the civilized West.' Well, I have bad news for you. Last year, a French tax official was caught stealing the financial data of people who held large amounts of crypto assets and other wealth. So, a French tax bureaucrat was selling personal financial data of French citizens to criminals. Now, as a result of this leak and countless other leaks from French government systems, you have a catastrophic rise in the number of kidnappings in France. Just in the first 3 months of 2026, you have over 40 victims of kidnappings in France. People getting tortured, harmed, harassed, humiliated, all because the government wanted too much data and failed to protect it. And now they want more of the data. The situation is already catastrophic as it is, but they don't want to stop there. They also want to access your personal messages. They want to access IDs of everybody who's using social media. Imagine the damage it can inflict if they get what they want.
Now, this is already completely insane and unbelievable. But there's a third method, a third issue, a trick that has been used by authoritarians for decades. And now it is being increasingly exported from the East to the West. I'm talking about selective enforcement of laws. Now, the way it works is pretty straightforward. First, you need to introduce a large number of laws. You need to overburden a certain industry with excessive, mutually exclusive, contradictory regulation. As a result, you make compliance impossible. Now you can treat every entrepreneur, every CEO, every business owner in this country in a certain industry as a criminal. But then the government carefully starts to choose who to persecute. If the business owner is loyal, if it complies with immoral and lawful demands from the government, gives certain political favors, then the law enforcement system and the judicial system look the other way. They don't do anything. But if the business owner decides to stand up for the constitutional rights of his or her fellow citizens, if they refuse to cave in to political demands from the authoritarian government, then the persecution and the enforcement of laws comes in full. And when somebody starts to criticize the government for doing that, the eternal perennial response is, 'We're just enforcing the law. You don't want to live in a country which is lawless. We're just enforcing the laws.' I personally experienced that in my days in Russia. I had a criminal investigation against me in 2013. I believe I have a criminal investigation against me in Russia today. But interestingly, this is something that we see increasingly in the West as well. And you can say, 'There is no way it can happen. It's something from the world of the barbaric East.' Well, I have bad news. Elon Musk said that the European Commission offered him a secret deal where they demanded that he conducts censorship of certain political narratives on his platform and in exchange the European Commission promised him not to enforce certain fines and laws on his company. Elon Musk said that he refused that offer. But most other platforms accepted it. Then Elon's company was hit by a 120 million euro fine from the European Commission for seemingly unrelated issues, something that has to deal with transparency. Now, we can doubt the words of Elon Musk. Maybe he was inventing things, right? But unfortunately his words are at least indirectly confirmed by the results of the investigation conducted by the US Congress. The US Congress published emails between the European Commission officials and managers of large social media platforms during the pandemic. These emails included attempts to pressure all these networks to silence political narratives and accounts that were inconvenient for the European Commission at that time. So, you had Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and others ban, censor, down rank, shadow ban, demote accounts and narratives that spread inconvenient truths or inconvenient narratives. The official justification for that was that the European Commission was trying to combat misinformation and conspiracy theories during the pandemic. Well, now years after, it seems that many of those so-called conspiracy theories turned out to be at least partially true and in any case were worthy of a public debate. Now, everything from the artificial origins of COVID to the limited nature of the anti-COVID measures to the immense harm done to the young generation by school closures, all of it, once considered conspiracy theories, is now becoming part of the mainstream debate and the mainstream view of what happened during COVID. So, those narratives were silenced not because they were untrue. They were silenced because they were inconvenient by those people in power. And if this is not political censorship I don't know what is.
Now, I myself have been personally exposed to selective enforcement of laws also in Europe. Not just in Russia. And I talked about it last year on this stage after I was arrested in Paris for reasons that are still unclear in 2024. I got offered a secret deal by the head of the French intelligence who asked me to silence certain political voices. Well, I refused that deal and I'm still under this investigation and still facing many years in prison. But, I don't want to talk about this today. I want to conclude by telling you a related story. Something that happened during these days when I was detained in Paris and I was spending a few days in police custody, basically a jail cell. I was interrogated for almost 3 days and there was this translator that was helping us. He was appointed by the judge. And after 3 days of translating, during one of these pauses between sessions, the translator was sitting there seemingly shocked. Perhaps she was shocked by the selective and political nature of the charges brought against me. But she looked at me, she looked at the police officers present and she said, 'I left the Soviet Union in the '80s because I wanted to escape an environment where my freedoms are limited. I wanted to escape an environment where human rights are disrespected. But now, after witnessing what I've witnessed, I feel like the Soviet Union is catching up with me. I feel like I'm back in the Soviet Union.' In that room in Paris, that woman who escaped the Soviet Union felt she's back in the Soviet Union. And of course, perhaps she was being over dramatic. Perhaps she was exaggerating things. But if we let the current trends continue, we can end up in a place much worse than the Soviet Union of the '80s. You know, when my parents sent each other letters or sent telegrams to their relatives in the Soviet Union of the late '80s, sometimes they expressed hope that the KGB would not open the letters. That the KGB would have enough resources to read everything that they have to write. After all, there was a human limit to surveillance. There were only so many KGB officers, only so many hours in a work day. Only so many letters they could open. Now, we don't have this luxury. In the world of AI, if we give up our right to privacy, you can be certain that every message that you send will be monitored, will be analyzed. Every draft, every thought, every idea will be scored. Every relationship will be mapped. The future can become much darker and more dystopian than the Soviet Union of the '80s. So, we don't have this luxury that the passengers of the Titanic had. We cannot afford to have this ship sunk. See, there is nowhere to escape. In the past, dissidents from authoritarian countries could flee to the west. But if the current trajectory continues, in a decade or two from now, they will have hard time trying to understand whether they have already left their repressive homeland or they're just entering another open-air prison. Now, I hope it will not come to that. But we need to realize the gravity of the situation. We need to start acting. We don't have a backup plan. We don't have lifeboats. There's no second West. There's no backup civilization. For decades or centuries, the West has been a guiding star for everybody who loved freedom, and we need to preserve that. If the ship of Western freedom sinks, the rest of the world is likely to follow. We will lose freedoms everywhere. So, we cannot let this happen. We cannot let this ship sink. The only way forward is to fix this ship. Let's do that. Thank you very much.
