The social network X has shut down operations in Brazil this month after one of its top-ranking officials faced arrest threats for failing to remove certain content. Binance founder, Changpeng Zhao, admitted his guilt last year for breaching federal money laundering rules on his digital currency platform. In 2021, potential arrest confrontations were faced by Twitter chiefs in India relating to posts the government demanded be deleted from the platform.
Pavel Durov, the founder of the digital communication tool, Telegram, was recently charged in France amid an investigation into the tool’s involvement in criminal activities, specifically the possession and sharing of child sexual abuse images.
For a substantial period of time, executives of internet enterprises rarely bore personal legal responsibility in Western democracies for occurrences on their platforms. Nonetheless, as increased attention is placed on digital platforms and exchanges by law enforcement departments, regulators, and policy drafters, assessing when to hold company leaders directly accountable is becoming more common.
The charges against Durov have emphasised this shift, provoking discussions about whether tech leaders, like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, could face the risk of arrest when they next visit Europe.
Currently, there’s little threat to tech executives though exceptional cases like Durov’s may crop up, according to experts.
Conventionally, corporations rather than individuals have been held accountable for platform breaches. The legal threshold is high in the US and Europe for charging individuals for conduct within the businesses they run, specifically reinforced by American laws such as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act offering protection to online platforms from liability for damaging speech.
However, the criterion for making top officials responsible for actions on their sites is becoming less stringent in certain areas, primarily child safety, stated TJ McIntyre, Associate Lecturer at the University College Dublin’s Law School.
The passing of an online safety law in Britain in the previous year allows tech leaders to be held personally liable if their company is notified of content placing child safety at risk and consistently neglects to remove it. Section 230 doesn’t cover some prohibited speech forms like child sexual exploitation.
McIntyre explains a gradual change over a period of 30 years. Since the 90s, tech chiefs weren’t usually held accountable for user behaviour on their platforms, although this viewpoint is currently being reconsidered by those seeking enhanced accountability.
Authorities in France detained Durov, a 39-year-old, leading up to last weekend and implicated him in numerous offences pertaining to illegal activities on Telegram. He was subsequently forbidden from exiting the nation on Wednesday. The establishment demanded Durov to provide a bail amount of €5 million and mandated him to report at the local constabulary on a bi-weekly basis, following his emancipation from incarceration.
Experts noted that Durov set himself up for backlash due to his rebellious ideology that governments should not limit online activities except for exceptional situations. This is contrasted against firms such as Meta, Google, and others that generally heed governmental directives. Additionally, French law enforcement criticized Telegram for not cooperating sufficiently.
In response to Durov’s capture ‘Telegram’ stated that it complied with EU regulations, and it was preposterous to hold a platform or its proprietor accountable for misuse of the said platform.
Tech conglomerates are meticulously scrutinizing potential legal repercussions their leaders might suffer. Meta, previously this year, defended its CEO, Zuckerberg, from being named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by New Mexico’s attorney general, accusing the company of lapses in child protection measures.
In harshly governed nations like China and Russia, American tech firms have often relocated their personnel in efforts to stop them from getting apprehended. The fear is these employees would be manipulated to coerce firms into eliminating content objectionable to the state.
Historically, there have only been a handful of occurrences where tech leaders might have been accountable for activities occurring through their services.
Precedences include Felix Somm, an ex-executive of CompuServe, receiving a suspended sentence in Germany in 1998 for abetting internet pornography – this judgement was later overturned. Timothy Koogle, former Yahoo CEO, was indicted in France for facilitating the sale of Nazi tokens on Yahoo which he was eventually acquitted from.
Kim Dotcom, Megaupload’s founder, was arrested in 2012 by US authorities for breaching copyrights related to his online portal. In 2015, Silk Road’s creator, Ross Ulbricht was convicted for enabling illegal drug sales in America. Additionally, Brazil held a Facebook official in custody briefly in 2016 for not supplying WhatsApp text records in a drug trafficking probe. This series of incidents concluded with Durov’s recent arrest.
The burden of proof lies on the prosecutors and law agencies, in establishing that tech industry officials were cognizant of illegitimate activities on their websites and remained passive about mitigating the damage, as stated by Daphne Keller, lecturer of web law at Stanford University.
Documentation of such cognizance remains a steep task, since corporations like TikTok, YouTube, Snap, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, have implemented measures to expunge and notify unlawful content to the appropriate authorities. This retort equips these executives to assert that they had endeavoured to act lawfully.
Former Google attorney, Daphne Keller, adds the elucidation that the knowledge of these actions is the principal matter in question here, acting as the prevalent catalyst towards the possible revocation of immunity.
Nonetheless, the jeopardy of being held legally responsible is an imperative deterrent to urge tech firms into being more proactive, claims Bruce Daisley, ex-vice president of Twitter prior to its acquisition and transformation into X by Elon Musk in 2022.
“The individual fear of being prosecuted holds more weight with executives than potential company fines,” Daisley wrote in The Guardian. Musk, who prefers a generally uninhibited method of regulating content on X, may find himself in a particularly vulnerable position comparable to that of Durov, Kate Klonick, associate professor at St John’s Law School opines. Klonick, who studies EU online platform regulations, goes as far as suggesting that Musk’s seeming disregard for the law could land him in court or even jail one day.
Contrarily, Musk remains tight-lipped on the matter. However, he has previously expressed concern, indicating Durov’s arrest as a threat to freedom of speech in an X post: “Imagine: It’s 2030, you reside in Europe, and are on the gallows for appreciating a meme.” The New York Times was the original publisher of this article.