Breaking News: US Government-Funded Censorship Unit ‘Atlantic Council’ Targeted Telegram Just Two Months Before Durov’s Arrest

from Revolver News:

French authorities arrested Russian-born dual UAE-French citizen Pavel Durov over the weekend as he stepped off his private jet in Paris. Durov, who is the CEO and founder of popular messaging app Telegram, faces a number of serious charges from French authorities, ranging from drug offences to child sexual exploitation.

Of course, none of these charges directly relate to Durov, but rather refer to activity that allegedly took place on Telegram, Durov’s privacy-focused messaging app with nearly 1 billion active users. The charging documents do not specify what exactly the French authorities’ argument is regarding Durov’s guilt, and French President Emmanuel Macron has gone on the defensive on X (formerly Twitter), assuring the public that the arrest was not “political.” Nevertheless, it is extremely unlikely that Durov’s arrest is unrelated to Durov’s well-known refusals to cooperate with censorship and law enforcement requests from intelligence agencies.

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Moreover, it is inconceivable that Durov’s arrest would have taken place without the prior knowledge and implicit approval, if not direct complicity and urging, of the US government. There are even reliable reports that Macron himself lured Durov for his arrest, since Durov apparently told French authorities that he had traveled to Paris at Macron’s invitation to dine with the French president. Strange indeed.

Suspicions about the timing and possible US complicity in Durov’s arrest are fueled by a DFR Lab-sponsored conference that criticized Telegram’s refusal to censor information related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab is a major censorship arm of the US regime. The lab’s censorship activities were extensively documented in the recently released Twitter Files and in Shellenberger’s accompanying testimony before the Justice Committee.

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Important organizations

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Digital Forensics Research (DFR) Lab at the Atlantic Council. The lab is one of the most established and influential full-time censorship agencies in the world.¹⁷ Atlantic Council DFR Lab created the foreign-facing DisinfoPortal in June 2018, working directly with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and 23 organizations to censor election stories in the run-up to the 2019 elections in Europe.18 In 2018, Facebook named the Atlantic Council an official partner in “countering disinformation” globally.19 U.S. taxpayer funding for the Atlantic Council comes from the Department of Defense, the U.S. Marines, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as energy companies and weapons manufacturers.

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The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika all have underdisclosed ties to the Department of Defense, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies. They work with multiple U.S. government agencies to institutionalize censorship research and advocacy within dozens of other universities and think tanks.

As if it wasn’t suspicious enough that the Atlantic Council is funded by US government intelligence agencies, the Atlantic Council was also infamously funded by notorious Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk (more on that below). Thus we see the convenient timing that two months after the Atlantic Council (US government censorship cutout) exposes Telegram’s problematic refusal to censor information in the Ukraine war, Durov is arrested in France. Funny how that works!

This is consistent with the findings of Mike Benz, a former State Department official and world authority on the censorship-industrial complex. Benz has reported that U.S. government-funded media outlets such as Radio Free Europe have singled out Telegram for an attack on a similar timeline (shortly after Durov’s interview with Tucker Carlson four months ago).

Read more @ Revolver.news