US Government-Funded Censorship Arm ‘Atlantic Council’ Targeted Telegram Just Two Months Before Durov Arrest
August 28, 2024

French authorities arrested Russian-born dual UAE-French citizen Pavel Durov last weekend as he disembarked his private plane 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 offenses to child sexual exploitation offenses.
Of course, none of these charges have anything to do with Durov directly but rather refer to activity that allegedly occurred on Telegram, Durov’s privacy-focused messaging app that boasts nearly 1 billion active users. It is unclear from the charging documents what exactly the French authorities’ argument is regarding Durov’s culpability, and French President Emmanuel Macron defensively took to X (formerly Twitter) to assure the public that the arrest wasn’t “political.” Nonetheless, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that Durov’s arrest is unconnected to Durov’s well-known refusals to cooperate with intelligence agencies’ censorship and law enforcement requests. Furthermore, it is inconceivable that Durov’s arrest would occur without the foreknowledge and implicit approval, if not direct complicity and urging, of the United States government. There are even reputable reports that Macron himself may have lured Durov in for his arrest, as Durov apparently told French authorities that he traveled to Paris at the invitation of Macron to have dinner with the French President. Odd indeed.
Suspicions regarding the timing and possible US complicity in Durov’s arrest are heightened by virtue of a DFR Lab-sponsored conference attacking Telegram’s refusal to censor information relevant to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab is a major censorship arm of the US regime, whose censorship activities were prominently featured in the recently released Twitter Files, as well as the associated testimony of Shellenberger to the Judiciary Committee.
Digital Forensics Research (DFR) Lab at the Atlantic Council. The lab is one of the most established and influential full-time censorship institutions 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 narratives leading up to the 2019 elections in Europe.18 In 2018, Facebook named Atlantic Council, an official partner in “countering disinformation” worldwide.19 US taxpayer funding to the Atlantic Council comes from the Defense Department, the US Marines, the US Air Force, the US Navy, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as energy companies and weapons manufacturers.
The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika all have inadequately-disclosed ties to the Department of Defense, the C.I.A., 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 though it’s not 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 this below). Thus we see the convenient timing that two months after the Atlantic Council (censorship cutout of the US government) singles out Telegram’s problematic refusal to censor information in the Ukraine war, Durov is arrested in France. Funny how that works!
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