Re: Telegram: “They are truly bad actors.” That doesn’t mean that Durov necessarily deserves to be in prison, but it does mean that Telegram and other social media platforms need to take content moderation much more seriously. The quote comes from a cybersecurity guy. The non-quote are Max Boot’s words from his opinion column from the Washington Post.
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Pavel Durov stepped off his private jet and French police “swooped” in to arrest him. That’s the word the Daily Mail used. Swooped. Beekeepers don’t walk into near-literal hornet’s nests without protective gear. Why would a guy who can afford to buy Elba fly into a virtual hornet’s nest if he thought — even for a moment — that he might be nabbed? He didn’t see that coming, did he?
Did he plan to parry with authority? Flaunt something? Did he think some highly placed friends would save him? Why? None of it makes sense. Reading the stories gives me a sense we’re at some pivotally consequential inflection point with things like censorship and freedom of speech on one side and child sex abuse material (CSAM), human trafficking, drug deals, and whatever else people conceal when they transact on the dark web on the other.
And, I think if I figure out if Durov is a good actor or a bad actor, I might unlock the puzzle. But geez Louise, it’s hard to tell the good actors from the bad. If Olivier could just show up and recite a phone book, life would be so much easier.
The problem starts with defining Telegram. It’s easy to say Telegram is a social media platform. Too easy. But Telegram is not social. It’s antisocial. Social media is a public space. Mostly, it’s about broadcasting messages to mass audiences. Social platforms — think of Instagram —foster openness. Because big and open is good for business. More likes, more views, more audiences, more posts. Rinse, repeat. Their problem is what happens when things get too open.
Telegram is not social media. Not the way we think of social media. Platforms like Telegram (there are others, like WhatsApp) are meant to protect private communications among smaller groups.
We hear words like private and encrypted. In lay terms, it works like this. We put our message into a little envelope, seal it, hit send, and the platform delivers it to our intended recipients.
Telegram is a modern-day post office. Yep, all this fuss is about a private version of the USPS. As long we’ve had mail, we’ve had a way to transmit private communications. We recognize that sometimes good actors need to see private stuff. Even then, in the US, authorities need a search warrant to open first-class mail. It’s a key difference between private and public fora. To close the analogy, postal content moderation exists for the magazines and other messages that aim use the network to reach a mass, public audience.
This big fight can’t be about moderating content between consenting people. So what is the fuss about? Transacting bad stuff on the dark web. Sending cash by mail is a lousy way to deal drugs and traffic humans. The assets don’t fit in envelopes and the cash (in large quantities) can be traced.
Really, it seems that Telegram’s issue is that it facilitates untraceable payments. Telegram has its own quiet currency. The Open Network dollars, marks, yen, rubbles, Toncoins.
Telegram’s technology and privacy policies foster a bazaar for things can’t see the light of day. Public channels on Telegram are less like chatrooms and more like auction houses. You can search for OxyContin, cloned credit cards, stimulus checks, stolen identities, AK47s. And you can pay with untraceable Toncoins.
It’s a good time to return to what’s going on here. I think I’ve been confused because Max’s thesis is flawed to its core. Worse, it focused my attention on all the wrong things.
[1] Re: Telegram: “They are truly bad actors.” Telegram is a platform. It can’t be a bad actor. Is Durov the bad actor? The people on Telegram? It’s a grammatically flawed and a syntactically null idea. But, hey, whatever sells papers right?
[2] Telegram and other social media platforms need to take content moderation much more seriously. Telegram is NOT a social media network. It’s a post office attached to an unregulated bank.
Telegram wants to be a super app. To most people that’s just jargon. But it matters. To me, this line of thinking, even in its raw form, is the only thing that begins to explain what’s going on around here.
It explains why Brazil wants to ban X. On the surface, they say it’s content moderation. Sure. X *is* a social platform. But, like Telegram, it aspires to be a super app.
Two things tell me I may be on an interesting path.
[1] Exceptions go a long way to proving rules.
Meta owns three platforms. Facebook and Instagram are social. WhatsApp is a private communications network. Sorry, Meta owns four. They also own Threads. In the last few hours gained millions of users in Brazil. Is their content moderation substantially better than X? No. Will they moderate content if asked? Not if we believe Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to the US House Judiciary Committee this week. So, why Threads and not X? Threads doesn’t aspire to be a super app. Meta could be if they wanted to. They completely avoid it. Huh.
[2] Payments.
Meta’s Instagram pays creators the standard sub-1% pittance all social platforms do. Telegram pays creators half of the revenue from ads in their channels. At first, I thought wow, that’s generous. Then, I remembered a movie called Boiler Room. Yes, I know we can all quote scenes from it the way they quoted scenes from Wall Street. In the movie, the fictious bank doing illegal deals paid its brokers illegally high commissions. Because… well, you can connect the dots. Does Telegram pay creators 50x higher percentages than social platforms because the activity is sketchy? Huh.
Looking for a simple explanation, I fed the foregoing into ACAI — my trusty AI trained on all things unCharles. I got this.
Ads are the worst form of monetization except for all other forms of monetization.
For all the things we don’t like about ads: that it trounces our privacy, made for advertising sites, clickbait, billions of dollars in fraud, gobs of issues with ad tech, Google’s iceberg of don’t be evil floating on a far deeper foundation of evilosity, at least ads are easy. A simpleton like me understands the model. Show lots of ads to lots of people and get paid lots of money.
Telegram advocates for privacy. Cosmo Jiang, a portfolio manager at Pantera Capital says, “If you protect data and privacy, you can’t sell ads. Telegram has been really bad at monetization.”
When we don’t see ads, we don’t see business models. And, maybe that’s why Durov got nabbed. Telegram is really complicted. It’s all so simple.
Didn’t see that coming? Did ya?