Elon Musk defends Telegram CEO Pavel Durov after his arrest in France

“Moderation is a propaganda word for censorship,” Musk once said.

He reminded his millions of followers of that today after French police arrested Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov near Paris on Saturday.

Police told local media they were investigating crimes – including fraud, drug trafficking and organized crime – on Telegram. It comes after some European nations accused Telegram of failing to moderate criminal content.

If there’s a fellow Musk kin in the world, it’s Durov. Telegram’s founder fled Russia to avoid giving up user data for the Russian social media platform he founded in 2006, called Vkontakte. And it has repeatedly refused to limit content on Telegram related to the conflict in Ukraine and Gaza or communications between groups considered terrorist by some Western governments.

“We can’t make messaging technology secure for everyone except terrorists,” Durov said in an interview with CNN in February 2016. “It’s either secure or it’s not.”

That kind of message resonates with Musk, who in a series of posts since Durov’s arrest has criticized the move as a violation of free speech.

“Liberty Liberty! Liberty?” he wrote in one post. “Dangerous times,” he wrote in another post.

Musk added a “FreePavel” hashtag when he shared a video of Durov praising Musk and his vision for free speech during an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year.

“It’s vital to support free speech that you forward X posts to people you know, especially in countries with heavy censorship,” Musk wrote to X on Sunday.

It also posted a tweet from Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of Rumble, a right-wing YouTube rival. Pavlovski said in a post on Sunday that France had “crossed a red line” with Durov’s arrest.

While Musk is a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, he has a history of silencing his critics. He fired employees who disagreed with him and banned accounts critical of him.