1. First, Macron hasn't wiped out crime among 70M Frenchmen with all the power of the French State. So it's completely unreasonable to expect Durov to wipe out crime among 1B+ Telegram users with his minimal power of content moderation.

2. Second, the deeper point is that the French state is deeply uninterested in public safety! They allow violent crime, fundamentalist terrorism, and drug dealing to run rampant in France. Just compare Paris to what it was a few generations ago.

3. Third, is Macron held personally responsible for every beheading, rape, and robbery that occurs on French soil? Is he jailed when traveling for violating the human rights of French citizens by not "moderating" his community hard enough? No, he is not. Even though the tools of the French state are vastly greater than those of Telegram, over a vastly smaller userbase. Again: Macron has ~70M citizens to deal with, while Telegram has almost 1B users.

4. Finally, we already know what a real anti-crime policy looks like. It looks like @nayibbukele. And President Bukele is for encryption, and has invited programmers to build on El Salvadoran soil — an offer they'd be well-advised to take up.

5. So: France is an anarcho-tyrannical regime. It doesn't need sophisticated surveillance to stop drug dealing — because it's all happening in public! They know exactly where the criminals are, and the victims too. They are literally setting up spaces for them to do drugs till they die.

I mean, does France need to imprison the CEO of Telegram to stop this?

(reposted from Balaji’s twitter because it’s such a good comment)