South Korea's deepfake crackdown, Durov latest and no more quote post dunking

Hello and welcome to Everything in Moderation's Week in Review, your in-depth guide to the policies, products, platforms and people shaping the future of online speech and the internet. It's written by me, Ben Whitelaw and supported by members like you.

Unlike other weeks, in which a myriad of online speech stories jostle for interest, this week's news agenda has been dominated by two standout narratives that, coincidently, are both about platform CEOs. While there are no prizes for guessing which ones, what both stories mean for the future of online speech is hazier and potentially concerning.

It's been a while since I welcomed new EiM subscribers so hello, greetings, salutations to new subscribers from Twitch, Anti Defamation League, UK Home Office, Thorn, Ofcom, Technology Coalition, User Rights, ISOC, PartnerHero, PwC, Google and elsewhere. 

Let's get into it; here are this week's stories— BW

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Policies

New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation

On Wednesday, four days after arresting him as part of an investigation into criminal activity on the platform that he founded, French authorities indicted Telegram CEO Pavel Durov on six charges. He was released on a 5m euro bail.

The French prosecutor’s office noted that Telegram appeared in “multiple cases involving various offenses“ (sic) and exhibited “total failure to respond to judicial requests", reported Politico. As Alice wrote in T&S Insider on Wednesday, there is justified cause for concern but we still don’t have all of the details about why this and why now. That's the gist of most of this week's analysis:

• Platformer’s Casey Newton breaks down what happened but suggests “we don’t know quite yet” what impact it will have on other platforms.
• Mike Masnick over on Techdirt wrote that a “lot of the things listed in the charge sheet are things that lots of websites and communications providers could be said to have done themselves, though perhaps to a different degree.”
• Alex Hern of The Guardian notes that this is partly down to Telegram’s inability to decide between being an end-to-end messaging service and a public platform.