There’s a reason Elon Musk isn’t fighting for speech rights in France: expert

Musk has framed the months of legal back-and-forth as a principled battle for free speech, casting Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes as an outmoded tyrant bent on censoring his political opponents.

Brazil’s High Court last week seized more than $3 million from X and SpaceX to pay X’s fines, and earlier this month the country’s telecoms regulator threatened to revoke Starlink’s license to operate in Brazil. The Times reported that a loss of revenue in one of X’s biggest markets may have contributed to the company’s decision to now comply with court orders.

But a corporate law expert told Business Insider there’s a reason the billionaire isn’t taking his fight for free speech principles to, say, France.

The arrest of Pavel Durov was a warning

“All you have to see is what happened with Telegram, with Pavel,” Anat Alon-Beck, a researcher focused on corporate law and governance at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told BI.

In August, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France and charged with six crimes related to illegal content hosted on its messaging platform, including “complicity” in the distribution of child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking on Telegram, as well as refusing to cooperate with an official investigation of the platform.

Durov’s arrest has raised international questions about the responsibility of tech executives for the content hosted on their sites. Telegram, in a statement released shortly after his arrest, said Durov had “nothing to hide” and called the CEO’s detention “absurd.”

Outside the US, Alon-Beck noted, there are more privacy protections for consumers, more enforcement of content moderation laws, as well as various types of regulations, which is forcing tech executives to rethink their approach to content moderation on their platforms to mitigate the risk of breaking local laws and face legal consequences – as Musk did in Brazil and Durov did in France.

“In those markets, you have to comply. Nobody is above the law — not even Elon Musk,” Alon-Beck said, adding that it doesn’t matter how Musk feels about international laws or how they compare to U.S. regulations: “The point is, when you have global business and you operate outside the US, you must obey those laws or pay the price. If Elon wants to be able to travel freely, he will have to comply, and so will others.”

Musk has previously complied with requests to moderate content from other governments, including the increasingly authoritarian nations of Turkey and India. In 2023, he indicated he would comply with the European Union’s content moderation regulation, known as the Digital Services Act, Politico reported.

Alon-Beck said Durov’s arrest served as a warning from French authorities to all tech executives trying to circumvent local regulations, particularly those related to content moderation on social media.

“I think that point has been very well taken — or should be taken — by others,” Alon-Beck said.

After the Telegram CEO was arrested, Musk quickly weighed in on the situation with a series of posts on X, including adding a “FreePavel” hashtag to a clip of Durov being interviewed by Tucker Carlson.

Alon-Beck told BI that in countries like France with strict content moderation laws, Musk is no different from Durov and would expect him to be arrested if he continues to push the boundaries of local content moderation laws.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s Instagram, X or Telegram — they’re all platforms from those countries that do things differently than we do here in the US,” Alon-Beck said. “It doesn’t matter if I agree or not. The thing is, they have those enforcement systems – and as you can see, they’re strict about them.”

Representatives for X, Telegram and the Brazilian Supreme Court did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.