The arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov not only has a Russian or Western dimension, but a South Korean one as well, which will influence the future fate of both the messenger and its owner.

According to a third version, the situation is even more interesting. In South Korea, the internet is generally ‘passport-based’; in order to register on forums or be active, registration with an identity card is required. Formally, this was done to combat trolling, bullying, etc., however, the national intelligence service thus has the ability to track anti-government statements. Therefore, the ones seeking freedom of speech in the Republic of Korea are searching for sites that are not under domestic jurisdiction.

The situation was further aggravated by the scandalous discovery that the most common messenger in ROK (KakaoTalk) is read through by special services. After that, Koreans began to switch to Telegram, which was perceived as a territory of freedom because of the policy of its administrators. Indeed, Telegram has shown that it is such after a whole series of high-profile cases, the defendants of which got off lightly exclusively because of the messenger administration’s policy.

In the author’s opinion, the most famous case concerns the blogger ‘Druking’. This was the scandal when a group of bloggers associated with President Moon’s inner circle manipulated (through former Governor Kim Kyung-soo) public opinion by meddling with comments, using bots and spreading rumours. According to information the author has from informal sources, fake news was created and inserted in the same way, which brought outraged people to the street on the eve of the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. However, we most likely will not know the truth anymore. All negotiations took place in secret Telegram chats and when the investigation demanded to show the logs, the........

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