Pavel Durov, Mark Zuckerberg and a child in the dungeon

You may have heard of the city of Omelas. It is a paradise by the sea. Everyone lives in bliss there. There are churches, but no priests. Sex and beer are omnipresent, but consumed in moderation. There are carnivals and horse racing. Beautiful children play flutes in the streets.

But Omelas, the creation of the science fiction author Ursula LeGuinhas an open secret: in one of the houses there is a dungeon, and in it lives a starving, abused child who lives in his own excrement. Everyone in Omelas knows about the child who will never be freed from captivity. The unusual, utopian happiness of Omelas, we learn, depends entirely on the misery of this child.

This is not the end of the story of Omelas, which I will return to later. But the point of the story is that it asks us to think about the price we are willing to pay for the worlds we want. And so it is a story that, at least this week, has a lot to do with the internet and free speech.

On Saturday, French police arrested Pavel Durovthe Russian-born CEO of Telegram, at an airport near Paris.

Telegram is a kind of Wild West messaging platform, known for lax moderation, shady characters and openness to dissidents from authoritarian societies. There, nearly a billion people can chat with family in Belarus, hang out with Hamas, buy weapons, make plans. Vladimir Putin's downfall, or watch videos of the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov Shoot machine guns at various rocks and trees.

After Durov was held for three days, a French court on Wednesday charged him with six counts and released him on $6 million bail. French authorities say Durov refused to cooperate with investigations into groups using Telegram to violate European laws: money laundering, human trafficking and child sexual abuse. In particular, Telegram refused to comply with legally obtained arrest warrants.

A chorus of free speech advocates has come to his aid. The most important among them is Elon Muskwho responded to Durov's arrest by claiming that within a decade Europeans would be executed just for liking the wrong memes. Musk himself is in the crosshairs in Brussels because he knows whether X moderates content in line with (possibly subjective) hate speech laws.

Somewhat less convincingly, the Kremlin – the center of power in a country where government critics often end up in prison, exile or jail – raised the alarm about Durov's arrest, calling it an attack on freedom of expression.

I cannot know whether the charges against Durov are justified. That is for the French courts to prove. And it is undoubtedly true that Telegram provides a real space for free speech in some truly depraved authoritarian societies (I will not believe the rumors about Durov's collaboration with the Kremlin until they are backed up by more than just the coincidence of his birthplace).

But based on what we know so far, Durov's defense of free speech comes down to a kind of real-world Omelas.

Even the most staunch defenders of free speech understand that there are reasonable limits. Musk himself has said X will remove all “illegal” content.

Maybe some laws are flawed or stupid. Maybe the restrictions on hate speech in Europe really are too subjective. But if you live in a world where the value of free speech on a platform like Telegram is so high that it should be virtually immune to laws that regulate, say, child abuse, then you're choosing a certain kind of Omelas that happens to look a lot like Le Guin's. A child could pay the price for the utopia you desire.

At the same time, however, another Omelas must be taken into account.

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Congress admitting that during the pandemic he had caved in to pressure from the Biden administration to suppress certain voices that deviated from the official COVID message.

Zuck said he regretted this because, in hindsight, the banned content was not really worth banning. His company would speak out “more forcefully” against government pressure next time.

To reiterate what he says happened: The head of the most powerful government in the world got the head of the most powerful social media company in the world to suppress certain voices that, in hindsight, should not have been suppressed. You don't have to be a member of the Free Speech Absolutist Club™ to be disturbed by this.

It's fair to say that we didn't know then what we later learned about a whole range of pandemic measures related to mask mandates, lockdowns, school closures, vaccine effectiveness, etc. And there were undoubtedly many absolutely psychotic and dangerous ideas floating around.

In addition, there are many real problems with social media, hate and violence – the speed of bad or destructive information is immense, and the profit incentives behind echo chambering make the Marketplace of ideas into something more like a Food Court of Unheard Complaints.

But in a world where we only find the best answers by asking and criticizing, governments that loudly proclaim what can and can't be posted on social media sites is a path to darkness. It's another kind of Omelas – a utopia of officially sugarcoated “truths” where a person with a different idea of ​​what's happening can be locked away.

By the way, something strange happens at the end of Le Guin's story. A small group of people make a dangerous decision. Instead of living in a society whose utopia is based on one single misery, they simply leave it.

Unfortunately, we don't have that option. We're stuck here.

So what is the right balance between freedom of speech and security without landing someone in prison?