The UK government wants to ban social media for children under 16. Every platform will have to verify user age with an ID, face scan, or bank card before granting access.
Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, published his response to his 12,102,238 subscribers.
Durov posted his response to 12 million Telegram subscribers. Source: Telegram
This is not a free speech story. It is a surveillance story dressed up as child protection.
What Durov Got Right
The Russia comparison is accurate. When the Russian government banned Telegram in 2018, 95% of Russian teenagers kept using it. They moved to VPNs. The ban lasted two years and accomplished nothing except pushing users toward less regulated corners of the internet. The same pattern played out in Iran.
Banning a platform does not remove demand. It removes visibility. Children who want to access social media will access it through a VPN, without parental oversight, on platforms that do not comply with UK law and have no incentive to.
The VPN point is the most important one nobody in the UK policy debate is saying out loud. Age verification forces compliant platforms to build identity infrastructure. Non-compliant platforms become more attractive to exactly the users the law is trying to protect.
What Durov Did Not Say
Telegram has 12 million subscribers on Durov’s personal channel. The UK Children’s Online Safety Act directly threatens Telegram’s user base in one of its largest English-speaking markets. Durov has a direct financial interest in the argument he is making.
That does not make the argument wrong. It makes it incomplete.
The sentence that matters most in his post is the one he buried at the end. Under the new law, all social media users in the UK will have to prove they are over 16 with an ID, face scan, or bank card. Thousands in the UK are already arrested for political posts every year.
That is not a child protection law. That is a national identity database for social media access. The child protection framing is the justification. The database is the infrastructure. Infrastructure built for one purpose has historically been repurposed.
The UK has arrested over 1,000 people for social media posts in the past 12 months. Now it wants a verified ID attached to every social media account.
Durov is right that the ban will not protect children. He stopped one paragraph short of explaining what it will actually do.
