In both the East and West, governments are after social media for similar reasons. In America, Meta Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the government pushed his company to censor news during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the 2020 election. Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France for offenses relating to his social media site.

It's hard to divorce these two stories. With Zuckerberg's letter, it's unassailable that the government was trying to restrict and counter the flow of information in the country. Durov's case is dicier because the French are trying to nail him on hard crimes to avoid the issue of curbing speech. However, Telegram's role in global speech is unmatched, particularly in closed societies with authoritarian leaders.

Zuckerberg wrote his letter to Rep. Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary Committee. He said:

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree.

He went on to say that Meta ultimately chose to remove content or censor it, but he didn't like the government pressure and thought they should have publicly addressed those issues.

Zuckerberg went on to describe the FBI's role in curtailing the Hunter Biden laptop story. In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead-up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and inretrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story."

With Durov, French authorities  arrested him for "running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud, as well as the refusal to communicate information to authorities, money laundering and providing cryptographic services to criminals."

Those charges are undoubtedly true. That's a feature of Telegram, one of the most downloaded apps in the world. It's fully encrypted, and Telegram keeps none of the customer data, allowing for protected, encrypted communication between anyone.

Dissidents worldwide use it to communicate in authoritarian regimes. For instance, in Ukraine, this is the primary method of people communicating safely from Russian eyes. Russia hates the app and has long tried to prevent people from using it within its borders. Bans on it have backfired.

You can find similar stories in China and all the closed Islamic countries that heavily censor speech and communication. Telegram is how people get around government censorship. It's a direct threat to authoritarian regimes.

It's also unquestionably used by criminals and others who want similar services. Technology that helps those opposed to authoritarian regimes, people who made criminals purely to oppose their leaders, will also help actual criminals in open societies.

Zuckerberg's letter reveals that the United States government exerts similar pressures as what we see abroad. The government has no role in censoring speech, even that which it deems dangerous. In France, this ends up aiding terrorist cells and others who use Telegram.

In the United States, the Biden administration asked for memes to be censored. During the Trump administration, the FBI pressured social media news sites away from the Hunter Biden laptop story. What role does the FBI have in policing speech and what people think or say? They can always issue a statement.

Where do things head from here? America touts itself as the leading country for free speech in the world. But we have a government that acts like one of the worst actors abroad. We don't need the United States government approaching social media like the Russians or any of the Arab countries where repression is a daily reality.

The European Union has recently joined the censorship spree, trying to censor information on Elon Musk's X. The U.K. launched a drive to jail people for their social media posts.

Looking at Telegram and its new legal issues, it's hard to miss a similar tune. These are the same actions we're seeing everyone else. Durov may have committed crimes worth prosecuting, and I don't deny that part. But when put together with the last few months of assault on platforms that encourage free speech, it's hard not to miss when Durov is suddenly a problem versus not.

Hopefully, Zuckerberg's letter is the last such action we see. But the American government is trending in the same direction as these other countries, and that's disturbing by itself.