On different sides of the state: how Facebook was fried in the US Congress, while Telegram fought with the FSB
The paths of Facebook and Vkontakte have diverged so thoroughly that no one has long reproached VK for its origin. Vkontakte parted on different roads with Pavel Durov. And with the success of the Telegram messenger, Durov’s comparisons with Mark Zuckerberg stopped. Only two brilliant millennials remained, turning their ideas into billion-dollar businesses. Each of them has its own way, but they cannot escape from common challenges.
Being the leaders of their generation in the network space, they do not just change its landscape - they form a corridor of opportunities for millennials in general. If Facebook and Telegram solve the problem in the same way, their choice becomes the choice of 2 billion of their users. If, however, they give different answers to the next challenge of the changing Internet, then a space of choice arises, and the right of the final decision remains with the users. Of course, not only Durov and Zuckerberg define these corridors of opportunities, but they, in addition to their own influence, are also representative of the most influential generation on the Internet today.
In this sense, both Facebook and Telegram were indicative of 2016-2018. Since the inception of the World Wide Web, it has been a territory of anonymity with islands of security. However, factors hostile to anonymity have been accumulating on the Web for years. In 2016, they may have for the first time reached a critical mass of becoming a global threat. And in 2018 there was an open clash.
Telegram faced this crisis in the form of precedents of increasing pressure from the special services of various states - primarily, of course, the FSB and its voluntary assistants in Russia. Facebook faced other manifestations of the 2016 call, falling into the center of a scandal with interference in the US presidential election, however, both stories developed with amazing synchronism.
Inserts from the chronicle of the scandal unfolding in parallel with the development of the Facebook scandal in the USA in 2016–2018 between the Telegram’s clash with the FSB should give more than a clear picture of the similarities and differences between the two stories.
In 2016, America was busy with the presidential election. It is busy: the election of the US president is not an event, but a process. The election campaign, starting with the primaries of candidates from leading parties, took a whole year. It was an exhausting, scandalous marathon with an unexpected outcome - the victory of Donald Trump - which the American politician is still trying to digest. And in the course of this process, one scandalous secret is constantly revealed after another.
Talk that the rise of fake news and, along with it, the political star of Donald Trump, occurred precisely on Facebook, began immediately after his victory. More educated Americans pointed to the disastrous consequences of replacing professional media with freentent as a source of news.
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia ...
In Russia, in 2016, the "Spring Law" was passed, giving the FSB the right to demand from any services operating in Russia the "golden keys" to all their secret doors - that is, decryption of any communications passing through them at the request of the heirs of the tsarist secret police and NKVD.
Facebook itself got it too: representatives of the social network had to make excuses for indiscriminateness in whose money they take for paying for political advertising, back in 2017. In September 2017, the New York Times published an article about one hundred thousand dollars spent by Russian battle trolls on political advertising.
In October, the Facebook vice president had to make excuses for this in the US Senate, falling under the mocking distribution of Democratic Senator Al Franken : “How did you constantly suspect billions of data processing when political ads [for the USA] were paid in rubles? Can you guarantee that you won’t accept North Korean won next time? ”
Trying to explain that advertising from anywhere in the world can be bought for dollars, the representative of the social network was completely lost amid Franken’s pressure, who, despite the senselessness of his claims, won a psychological victory .
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia ...
The "telegram" had to sort things out already with the FSB , which in September 2017 demanded to give her the keys to decrypt the messenger. Telegram did not obey their requests, for which in October he was fined 800,000 rubles under the law of Spring.
But the arguments were completely outweighed in favor of Facebook in March 2018, when the American edition of The New York Times and the British The Guardian (incidentally, both editions in 2013 were among the first to publish revealing material by Edward Snowden), published an investigation into how, in 2016, the British political technology company Cambridge Analytica via Facebook gained access to personal data of 50 million Americans and used it to better campaign for Donald Trump in the US presidential election.
As in the case of Snowden, for exposing a new grandiose invasion of privacy, the public again owes another whistleblower, a former participant in this indecency.
Christopher Wiley , a former Cambridge Analytica employee, said that under the roof of a research organization was a political technology office that developed a psychological test that Facebook users were asked to take for money, supposedly for scientific purposes. At the same time, users were requested access to their profile information and the list of friends. So, through 270 thousand users who passed the test, "Analyst" became aware of information about 50 million of their friends, including their beliefs, character traits, preferences, interests and much more. Based on these data, it has become possible to target them as targeted as possible political advertisements on Facebook itself, beating right at the “internal demons” of voters.
The story caused a great scandal. The liberal half of the divided American society, who was voting for the Democratic Party, was already experiencing a reentiment for the second year by the end of November 2016, received not only another clue in the words of the loser Hillary Clinton, What happened - but also “Who is to blame” at the same time. The answer was now demanded from Mark Zuckerberg. For a while, Zuckerberg, following the recommendations of his lawyers, was silent, which only increased public indignation.
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia ...
On March 20, 2018, the Supreme Court denied Telegram a lawsuit against order 432 governing the transfer of FSB encryption keys. On the same day, Roskomnadzor demanded that Telegram execute order 432 within 15 days, threatening to block the messenger in Russia.
In order not to aggravate the situation further, Zuckerberg, not hiding that this was also the decision of his PR and legal team, commented on the situation and went on a penitential tour, the main program number of which was his speech at the hearings of the House of Representatives and the US Senate.
On April 10 and 11, 2018, about five hours a day, Mark Zuckerberg testified at a public hearing in Congress. On April 10, Zuckerberg was interrogated by members of the US Senate Legal and Commerce Committee. They were interested in the political views of Facebook moderators, the fight against trolls and the alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election.
On April 11, questions were asked by members of the Energy and Trade Committee of the House of Representatives of the US Congress. It was a very paradoxical sight. American congressmen, who for the most part did not have a clue about how social networks work, data collection, online advertising, angrily and strictly reported to Mark Zuckerberg for two days, embodying the anger of their constituents and generating new pearls, including the meme exclamation of the Republican Senator from Louisiana John F. Kennedy: “ Your user agreement sucks! ".
In response, Zuckerberg explained how the “materiel” was actually built in response to the actual mistakes of the congressmen, talking about the leakage of even his own data; and expressed support for the external regulation of social networks and constantly assured Facebook’s intentions in the future to carefully check all applications and programs that could potentially be involved in the illegal collection of private data - in response to their emotional reproaches.
The media were again on the side of the indignant politicians, colorfully describing how Zuckerberg was “got grilled” (got grilled). However, the “side of the accusation” itself destroyed the remnants of the illusion of the capitalist, called to account by indignant citizens.
The same session of magic ended up exposing the same John Kennedy, failing to stretch the note of accusatory pathos to the end, when after a series of mocking remarks about the quality of legal documents Facebook, he hinted at the formidable force of the Senate authorities: “I would not want to regulate Facebook, but I see God, I’m ready to vote for it ”- and then“ shot myself in the foot ”, as the Americans say in such cases, developing their idea to the end:“ You can return home, spend $ 10 million on lobbyists to prevent us ”- and ending, in essence, with persuasion: “ Or You can return home and help us solve this problem . ”
And this blurred result did not go unnoticed, of course. “ Zuckerberg got off easily ,” wrote The Gurdian, but many American media outlets shared her view.
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia ...
On April 13, 2018, the Tagansky court of Moscow decided to block Telegram on the territory of the Russian Federation. “We consider the blocking decision to be unconstitutional and will continue to uphold the right to secrecy of correspondence between Russians,” Durov answered on April 16, in fact, the declaration of war by Roskomnadzor.
Having every opportunity to ignore the indignation of the American Congress, and not worrying that their user base is somewhere to get away from them in the near future and the entire American society, Facebook will not, and was not going to change its commercial model, based on maximizing the volume of collected data about their users - and, in fact, all other Internet users, too.
But Zuckerberg promised to take care that no one else would earn this, except for him, at least political points. But in November 2018, elections for governors and congressmen await America, and for this event, Zuckerberg decides to side with the state against the trolls.
Against the guerrilla attacks of the trolls, Zuckerberg set up a real regular network army: twenty thousand employees were hired to monitor Facebook by the end of 2018.
More than four hundred applications suspected of continuing the inglorious undertakings of Cambridge Analysts are already blocked, more than 1000 are under consideration. In the first six months, 1.3 billion fake accounts were demolished .
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia ...
Durov’s reaction to the announcement of the war messenger was a direct continuation of his personal war with the state , which has been going on since 2011.
The inglorious campaign of Roskomnadzor to block the Telegram was heatedly discussed in the Telegram itself, and links to articles about regular absurdities created by censors who almost banned the Internet were published by every second Telegram channel.
Durov commented on their efforts in his typical manner, using the language of the authorities to highlight their own stupidity:
Following the results of the first day of the announced blocking, Pavel Durov announced that he will support VPN administrators and proxy servers with grants in Bitcoins.
And Durova and Telegram, meanwhile, were supported by Edward Snowden, emphasizing the anarchist narrative.
In the past, I criticized the security of Telegram, but Durov’s reaction to the totalitarian demand of the Russian authorities to provide them with access to user correspondence - refusal and resistance - is the only morally worthy answer and a demonstration of true leadership
Facebook is supported by other social networks. Let's say Twitter began massively cleaning up hordes of Kremlin trolls that no doubt occupied it - but literally tangentially from real users, including the author of this article - after I sent a couple of “replays” to Dr. Neil DeGrass Tyson, an American scientist and popularizer science, and not politics at all (and not to the boxer, if that), I received a demand from Twitter on the threat of blocking to add a phone number to the profile.
Despite the fact that many political battles are still ahead in the US, and Telegram has not been unblocked in Russia, this story arc for Facebook and Telegram feels quite complete.
In 2016–2018, both Zuckerberg and Durov faced the same challenge: their states demanded a patriotic choice in spite of the traditional neutrality of network platforms. The US Congress demanded intervention to combat the Russian threat. The Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation required intervention to counter terrorism. Zuckerberg chose the path of the patriot, Durov chose the path of the anarchist. What is most amusing - everyone in their circumstances seems to have made the right choice.
But, although I am on the side of the sanitary-political campaign of American social networks and other platforms, understanding with even the slightest feeling that I’m not able to be Russian on the global Internet these days - incomparable, of course, with the inconvenience of American Japanese after Pearl Harbor - I can’t help to see that with the increase in distance, their holy war looks more and more dangerous and dangerous.
After all, in fact, recognizing the enormous power of its control potential over users, Facebook and Co decided to at least use it for the good. And if their good intentions seem frightening to you, then this is not paranoia, but the most common sense.
Therefore, the Durovskaya parallel is so important here, demonstrating that the policy of good intentions is not so uncontested. Thanks to Pavel Durov, the simple choice of “Well, what can we do, we had no choice” will not be dismissed - his epic with “Telegram” is a lesson in another choice.
PS "We continue the resistance." The climax of the political thriller The People vs. Facebook in the United States occurred on the eve of the entry into force of the EU Directive on the protection of digital information, GDPR, which also had a large-scale impact on the nature of the relationship of online services with users, on May 25, 2018.
The directive sets the rules for working with the personal data of users from the EU, thus touching on any service that has European users. This made Telegram formally establish its privacy policy.
According to her, the messenger can transmit to the authorities the IP addresses and phone numbers of users suspected of terrorism in court, pledging to publish a general summary of all such cases every six months.
However, as Durov clarified, while the FSB requires access to user correspondence, and Roskomnadzor continues the war with the messenger for destruction, the appeals of the Russian special services will not be considered:
PS You can support the author in rubles using the “Support the author” function or QIWI service.
Being the leaders of their generation in the network space, they do not just change its landscape - they form a corridor of opportunities for millennials in general. If Facebook and Telegram solve the problem in the same way, their choice becomes the choice of 2 billion of their users. If, however, they give different answers to the next challenge of the changing Internet, then a space of choice arises, and the right of the final decision remains with the users. Of course, not only Durov and Zuckerberg define these corridors of opportunities, but they, in addition to their own influence, are also representative of the most influential generation on the Internet today.
In this sense, both Facebook and Telegram were indicative of 2016-2018. Since the inception of the World Wide Web, it has been a territory of anonymity with islands of security. However, factors hostile to anonymity have been accumulating on the Web for years. In 2016, they may have for the first time reached a critical mass of becoming a global threat. And in 2018 there was an open clash.
Telegram faced this crisis in the form of precedents of increasing pressure from the special services of various states - primarily, of course, the FSB and its voluntary assistants in Russia. Facebook faced other manifestations of the 2016 call, falling into the center of a scandal with interference in the US presidential election, however, both stories developed with amazing synchronism.
Inserts from the chronicle of the scandal unfolding in parallel with the development of the Facebook scandal in the USA in 2016–2018 between the Telegram’s clash with the FSB should give more than a clear picture of the similarities and differences between the two stories.
The first part: “ How the problems of Mail.ru and the FSB were forged by the reputation of Pavel Durov and faith in Telegram
2016. Prologue
In 2016, America was busy with the presidential election. It is busy: the election of the US president is not an event, but a process. The election campaign, starting with the primaries of candidates from leading parties, took a whole year. It was an exhausting, scandalous marathon with an unexpected outcome - the victory of Donald Trump - which the American politician is still trying to digest. And in the course of this process, one scandalous secret is constantly revealed after another.
Talk that the rise of fake news and, along with it, the political star of Donald Trump, occurred precisely on Facebook, began immediately after his victory. More educated Americans pointed to the disastrous consequences of replacing professional media with freentent as a source of news.
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia ...
In Russia, in 2016, the "Spring Law" was passed, giving the FSB the right to demand from any services operating in Russia the "golden keys" to all their secret doors - that is, decryption of any communications passing through them at the request of the heirs of the tsarist secret police and NKVD.
September-October 2017
Facebook itself got it too: representatives of the social network had to make excuses for indiscriminateness in whose money they take for paying for political advertising, back in 2017. In September 2017, the New York Times published an article about one hundred thousand dollars spent by Russian battle trolls on political advertising.
In October, the Facebook vice president had to make excuses for this in the US Senate, falling under the mocking distribution of Democratic Senator Al Franken : “How did you constantly suspect billions of data processing when political ads [for the USA] were paid in rubles? Can you guarantee that you won’t accept North Korean won next time? ”
Trying to explain that advertising from anywhere in the world can be bought for dollars, the representative of the social network was completely lost amid Franken’s pressure, who, despite the senselessness of his claims, won a psychological victory .
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia ...
The "telegram" had to sort things out already with the FSB , which in September 2017 demanded to give her the keys to decrypt the messenger. Telegram did not obey their requests, for which in October he was fined 800,000 rubles under the law of Spring.
March 2018
But the arguments were completely outweighed in favor of Facebook in March 2018, when the American edition of The New York Times and the British The Guardian (incidentally, both editions in 2013 were among the first to publish revealing material by Edward Snowden), published an investigation into how, in 2016, the British political technology company Cambridge Analytica via Facebook gained access to personal data of 50 million Americans and used it to better campaign for Donald Trump in the US presidential election.
As in the case of Snowden, for exposing a new grandiose invasion of privacy, the public again owes another whistleblower, a former participant in this indecency.
Christopher Wiley , a former Cambridge Analytica employee, said that under the roof of a research organization was a political technology office that developed a psychological test that Facebook users were asked to take for money, supposedly for scientific purposes. At the same time, users were requested access to their profile information and the list of friends. So, through 270 thousand users who passed the test, "Analyst" became aware of information about 50 million of their friends, including their beliefs, character traits, preferences, interests and much more. Based on these data, it has become possible to target them as targeted as possible political advertisements on Facebook itself, beating right at the “internal demons” of voters.
The story caused a great scandal. The liberal half of the divided American society, who was voting for the Democratic Party, was already experiencing a reentiment for the second year by the end of November 2016, received not only another clue in the words of the loser Hillary Clinton, What happened - but also “Who is to blame” at the same time. The answer was now demanded from Mark Zuckerberg. For a while, Zuckerberg, following the recommendations of his lawyers, was silent, which only increased public indignation.
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia ...
On March 20, 2018, the Supreme Court denied Telegram a lawsuit against order 432 governing the transfer of FSB encryption keys. On the same day, Roskomnadzor demanded that Telegram execute order 432 within 15 days, threatening to block the messenger in Russia.
April 2018
In order not to aggravate the situation further, Zuckerberg, not hiding that this was also the decision of his PR and legal team, commented on the situation and went on a penitential tour, the main program number of which was his speech at the hearings of the House of Representatives and the US Senate.
On April 10 and 11, 2018, about five hours a day, Mark Zuckerberg testified at a public hearing in Congress. On April 10, Zuckerberg was interrogated by members of the US Senate Legal and Commerce Committee. They were interested in the political views of Facebook moderators, the fight against trolls and the alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election.
On April 11, questions were asked by members of the Energy and Trade Committee of the House of Representatives of the US Congress. It was a very paradoxical sight. American congressmen, who for the most part did not have a clue about how social networks work, data collection, online advertising, angrily and strictly reported to Mark Zuckerberg for two days, embodying the anger of their constituents and generating new pearls, including the meme exclamation of the Republican Senator from Louisiana John F. Kennedy: “ Your user agreement sucks! ".
In response, Zuckerberg explained how the “materiel” was actually built in response to the actual mistakes of the congressmen, talking about the leakage of even his own data; and expressed support for the external regulation of social networks and constantly assured Facebook’s intentions in the future to carefully check all applications and programs that could potentially be involved in the illegal collection of private data - in response to their emotional reproaches.
The media were again on the side of the indignant politicians, colorfully describing how Zuckerberg was “got grilled” (got grilled). However, the “side of the accusation” itself destroyed the remnants of the illusion of the capitalist, called to account by indignant citizens.
The same session of magic ended up exposing the same John Kennedy, failing to stretch the note of accusatory pathos to the end, when after a series of mocking remarks about the quality of legal documents Facebook, he hinted at the formidable force of the Senate authorities: “I would not want to regulate Facebook, but I see God, I’m ready to vote for it ”- and then“ shot myself in the foot ”, as the Americans say in such cases, developing their idea to the end:“ You can return home, spend $ 10 million on lobbyists to prevent us ”- and ending, in essence, with persuasion: “ Or You can return home and help us solve this problem . ”
And this blurred result did not go unnoticed, of course. “ Zuckerberg got off easily ,” wrote The Gurdian, but many American media outlets shared her view.
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia ...
On April 13, 2018, the Tagansky court of Moscow decided to block Telegram on the territory of the Russian Federation. “We consider the blocking decision to be unconstitutional and will continue to uphold the right to secrecy of correspondence between Russians,” Durov answered on April 16, in fact, the declaration of war by Roskomnadzor.
Summer 2018
Having every opportunity to ignore the indignation of the American Congress, and not worrying that their user base is somewhere to get away from them in the near future and the entire American society, Facebook will not, and was not going to change its commercial model, based on maximizing the volume of collected data about their users - and, in fact, all other Internet users, too.
But Zuckerberg promised to take care that no one else would earn this, except for him, at least political points. But in November 2018, elections for governors and congressmen await America, and for this event, Zuckerberg decides to side with the state against the trolls.
Against the guerrilla attacks of the trolls, Zuckerberg set up a real regular network army: twenty thousand employees were hired to monitor Facebook by the end of 2018.
More than four hundred applications suspected of continuing the inglorious undertakings of Cambridge Analysts are already blocked, more than 1000 are under consideration. In the first six months, 1.3 billion fake accounts were demolished .
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia ...
Durov’s reaction to the announcement of the war messenger was a direct continuation of his personal war with the state , which has been going on since 2011.
The inglorious campaign of Roskomnadzor to block the Telegram was heatedly discussed in the Telegram itself, and links to articles about regular absurdities created by censors who almost banned the Internet were published by every second Telegram channel.
Durov commented on their efforts in his typical manner, using the language of the authorities to highlight their own stupidity:
Russia's national security will decrease, as part of the personal data of Russians will move from a site neutral to the Russian Federation to the US-controlled WhatsApp / Facebook.
Following the results of the first day of the announced blocking, Pavel Durov announced that he will support VPN administrators and proxy servers with grants in Bitcoins.
And Durova and Telegram, meanwhile, were supported by Edward Snowden, emphasizing the anarchist narrative.
In the past, I criticized the security of Telegram, but Durov’s reaction to the totalitarian demand of the Russian authorities to provide them with access to user correspondence - refusal and resistance - is the only morally worthy answer and a demonstration of true leadership
Fall 2018
Facebook is supported by other social networks. Let's say Twitter began massively cleaning up hordes of Kremlin trolls that no doubt occupied it - but literally tangentially from real users, including the author of this article - after I sent a couple of “replays” to Dr. Neil DeGrass Tyson, an American scientist and popularizer science, and not politics at all (and not to the boxer, if that), I received a demand from Twitter on the threat of blocking to add a phone number to the profile.
Despite the fact that many political battles are still ahead in the US, and Telegram has not been unblocked in Russia, this story arc for Facebook and Telegram feels quite complete.
In 2016–2018, both Zuckerberg and Durov faced the same challenge: their states demanded a patriotic choice in spite of the traditional neutrality of network platforms. The US Congress demanded intervention to combat the Russian threat. The Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation required intervention to counter terrorism. Zuckerberg chose the path of the patriot, Durov chose the path of the anarchist. What is most amusing - everyone in their circumstances seems to have made the right choice.
But, although I am on the side of the sanitary-political campaign of American social networks and other platforms, understanding with even the slightest feeling that I’m not able to be Russian on the global Internet these days - incomparable, of course, with the inconvenience of American Japanese after Pearl Harbor - I can’t help to see that with the increase in distance, their holy war looks more and more dangerous and dangerous.
After all, in fact, recognizing the enormous power of its control potential over users, Facebook and Co decided to at least use it for the good. And if their good intentions seem frightening to you, then this is not paranoia, but the most common sense.
Therefore, the Durovskaya parallel is so important here, demonstrating that the policy of good intentions is not so uncontested. Thanks to Pavel Durov, the simple choice of “Well, what can we do, we had no choice” will not be dismissed - his epic with “Telegram” is a lesson in another choice.
PS "We continue the resistance." The climax of the political thriller The People vs. Facebook in the United States occurred on the eve of the entry into force of the EU Directive on the protection of digital information, GDPR, which also had a large-scale impact on the nature of the relationship of online services with users, on May 25, 2018.
The directive sets the rules for working with the personal data of users from the EU, thus touching on any service that has European users. This made Telegram formally establish its privacy policy.
According to her, the messenger can transmit to the authorities the IP addresses and phone numbers of users suspected of terrorism in court, pledging to publish a general summary of all such cases every six months.
However, as Durov clarified, while the FSB requires access to user correspondence, and Roskomnadzor continues the war with the messenger for destruction, the appeals of the Russian special services will not be considered:
continue the resistance .
PS You can support the author in rubles using the “Support the author” function or QIWI service.
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