Pavel Durov: belief

Transcript context

…I mean, there’s something darkly poetic about a tech founder of a platform where a billion people are communicating with each other and you’re on concrete, no pillow for days, no windows. I’m a huge fan of Franz Kafka and he’s written about the absurdity of these kinds of situations, hence the Kafkaesque stories. There’s a story literally about the situation that he wrote, perhaps predicted, called The Trial, where a person is arrested for no reason that anybody can explain and is stuck in the judicial system for a long time, that nobody fascinatingly in that story, neither the person arrested nor any individual member of the system itself fully understand what is happening. Nobody can truly answer the questions and eventually the person, spoiler alert, is mentally broken by the whole system, which is what bureaucracy can do in its most absurd form. It breaks the spirit, the human spirit laden in all of us. That’s the negative side of bureaucracy. I agree with you on the absurdity of this thing because if this was a good faith attempt to fix an issue, there were so many ways to reach out to Telegram, to reach out to me personally, voice their concerns, and solve any alleged problem in a way that is conventional and diplomatic the way every other country on this planet solves these problems, including with Telegram. We did it dozens of times. Yeah, you have a nice page showing this is like details that most people don’t really think about, but Telegram is at the forefront of moderating CSAM and terrorist groups. There’s a nice page, telegram.org/moderation that shows just the incredible amount of groups and channels that are engaged in terrorist activity and CSAM activity that are actively blocked, found and blocked by Telegram. A lot of this work, like you said, because of the automation is done with machine learning, just the scale is insane. This is stuff that most noobs like me who are just chatting it up on Telegram don’t think about, but there’s just an immense number of people essentially doing things that violate the law on there and you have to find them immediately and catch it. I guess all platforms have to deal with it. Telegram was doing a great job of dealing with that content. What you’re saying is the French government had no idea. Do they even know what machine learning is?…

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