Red Hot Cyber
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Sandro Sana : 2 December 2025 07:25
Post 462 on Durov’s official channel immediately went into “scream mode”: “ The end of the free internet. The free internet is becoming a tool of control .”
No birthday wishes. Durov explains that he doesn’t feel like celebrating because, in his opinion, his generation “is running out of time to save the free Internet our fathers built for us.”
What until recently seemed like the promise of an open and free web, a place for sharing, exchange, and information, is now turning into the “most powerful tool of control ever created.”
Durov doesn’t go easy: he names Western governments and states that, in his view, are embarking on a dangerous path. Digital identities, mass scanning of messages, preventive online controls, restrictions on freedom of expression . Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and France: all the targets of serious accusations.
The tone is unmistakable: according to him, we risk carrying with us the moral, intellectual, and existential failure of a generation that believed in the promise of the internet.
Durov is riding a perception, not necessarily incorrect, of a growing restriction of digital freedoms. And many of the elements he cites deserve serious attention: digital identity, age control, content moderation (or censorship), regulatory interference.
As attention has intensified on privacy, data, illegal content, and security, the idea of “the internet as an uncontrolled and free space” has come under pressure from regulations, surveillance techniques, filtering tools, anti-terrorism policies, and so on. In such a context, Durov’s warning, though extreme, resonates like an alarm bell that many experts have long been ringing.
Yet, it’s right to approach it with caution. Durov’s vision risks becoming too polarized: it presents a world painted in black and white, ignoring nuance. Control ≠ necessarily authoritarianism, regulation ≠ always censorship, moderation ≠ always repression.
In many cases, the measures he criticizes—digital identity regulations, filters for the protection of minors, moderation mechanisms—arise in response to real risks: organized crime, child abuse, misinformation, online hate. In short, there’s a real need for a balance between freedom and security.
It’s hard to ignore that Durov himself, and his creation Telegram, have long been under fire for poor content moderation. Since his arrest in France (August 2024), on serious charges related to trafficking in illicit material on the platform, the question of social media messenger liability has been on the table.
Those who today invoke “absolute freedom” in the name of privacy and the free flow of information should reckon with the gray areas of real-world use (and abuse) that Telegram allows.
That is: it’s good to defend digital freedom, but without turning the internet into a Wild West where anything goes.
If we accept as a given that governments, legislators, institutions—and even private companies—are gradually pushing for greater control of identities, data, and content, we face a cultural challenge: how much freedom are we willing to sacrifice in the name of security, order, and “control”?
For Italy, with historical weaknesses in privacy, transparency, bureaucracy, and regulatory dependence on the EU, Durov’s warning is a useful reminder: digital resilience must be built on a political and legal level, not just a technical one.
In an increasingly tense global context, the temptation to implement rapid measures, digital identity, profiling, and monitoring risks eroding what little remains of free and decentralized space.
Durov’s post 462, dark, provocative, and apocalyptic, serves a useful purpose: it stirs the waters and prompts reflection. But as often happens with these “digital calls to arms,” the risk is to think that anything less than total freedom is an enemy.
If we’ve learned anything in the field of cybersecurity—which concerns me personally—it’s that there are no binary solutions . Privacy and moderation, security and freedom, transparency and anonymity: these are tensions to be managed with balance, not wars to be won at all costs.
In this sense, Durov’s warning should be taken seriously, but as a push to build an informed debate , not as an absolute ideological manifesto.
And in Italy, where slogans about “freedom on the internet” are often thrown around without translating them into concrete rights—data protection, democratic controls, transparency—this debate is very much needed.
Sandro Sana