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

Musk presented the months-long legal battle as a principled fight for freedom of speech, portraying Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes as a tyrant bent on censoring his political opponents.

Brazil’s Supreme Court last week seized more than $3 million from X and SpaceX to settle fines imposed on X, and earlier this month telecom regulators in the country threatened to revoke Starlink’s license to operate in Brazil. The Times reported that a loss of revenue in one of X’s largest markets could have contributed to the company’s decision to now comply with the 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

“You just have to look at what happened with Telegram, with Pavel,” Anat Alon-Beck, a researcher who focuses on corporate law and governance at Case Western Reserve University’s law school, told BI.

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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, and refused to cooperate with an official investigation into the platform.

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

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

“In those markets, you have to abide by the law. No one is above the law — not even Elon Musk,” Alon-Beck said, adding that it doesn’t matter what Musk thinks about international laws, or how they compare to U.S. regulations: “The point is, if you have global businesses and you operate outside the U.S., you have to abide by those laws or pay the price. If Elon wants to be able to travel freely, he’s going to have to abide by them, just like everyone else has to.”

Musk has previously complied with requests for content moderation from other governments, including the increasingly authoritarian countries of Turkey and India. In 2023, he indicated he would abide by the European Union’s rulebook on content moderation, known as the Digital Services Act, Politico reported.

According to Alon-Beck, Durov’s arrest is a warning from French authorities to any tech executives trying to circumvent local regulations, especially those related to content moderation on social media.

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

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

Alon-Beck told BI that in countries like France, where there are strict laws on content moderation, Musk is no different than Durov. She expects Musk could be arrested if he continues to push the boundaries of local content moderation laws.

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

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