There is a reason why Elon Musk is not fighting for speech rights in France: expert

Musk portrayed the months-long legal back and forth as a principled battle for freedom of expression and described Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes as a tyrant who wanted to censor his political opponents and abused his power.

Brazil's High Court last week seized over $3 million from X and SpaceX to pay off fines imposed on X, and earlier this month the country's telecom regulators threatened to strip Starlink of its operating license in Brazil. The Times reported that a loss of revenue in one of X's biggest markets may have contributed to the company's decision to now comply with the court orders.

But a corporate law expert told Business Insider there is a reason why the billionaire is not expanding his fight for the principles of free speech to France.

The arrest of Pavel Durov was a warning

“You just have to look at what happened with Telegram and Pavel,” Anat Alon-Beck, a researcher specializing in corporate law and corporate governance at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told BI.

In August, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France and charged with six crimes in connection with 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 on their websites. In a statement released shortly after his arrest, Telegram said Durov had “nothing to hide” and called the CEO's detention “absurd.”

Outside the US, Alon-Beck said, there is more data protection for consumers, more enforcement of content moderation laws and various types of regulation, This is forcing technology managers to rethink their approach to content moderation on their platforms to reduce the risk of violating local laws. and must expect legal consequences – like Musk in Brazil and Durov in France.

“In these markets, you have to obey the law. Nobody 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 American regulations: “The point is, if you have global companies and you operate outside the U.S., you have to obey those laws or pay the price. If Elon wants to travel freely, he has to obey them, just like others have to.”

Musk has previously complied with requests for content moderation from other governments, including increasingly authoritarian Turkey and India. In 2023, he announced he would comply with the European Union's content moderation rulebook, known as the Digital Services Act, Politico reported.

Alon-Beck said Durov's arrest was a warning from French authorities to any technology executives trying to circumvent local regulations, particularly those related to content moderation on social media.

“I think this point has been very well taken up by others – or at least should be taken up,” said Alon-Beck.

Following the Telegram CEO's arrest, Musk immediately intervened in the situation with a series of posts on X. Among other things, he added the hashtag “FreePavel” to a clip of Durov's interview with Tucker Carlson.

Alon-Beck told BI that Musk is no different than Durov in countries like France, which have strict content moderation laws, and she believes he could be arrested if he continues to push the boundaries of local content moderation laws.

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

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