Last week, global headlines spotlighted two separate flashpoints in the battle by governments to police social media networks. In Paris, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested for complicity in distribution of child sexual abuse imagery. And in Brazil, a judge banned X (formerly Twitter) nationwide after the company refused to block certain users on the eve of election season.  While both incidents can be couched as failures to comply with national law, the unusually harsh remedies raise important concerns about free speech and privacy online.

Both Telegram and X (Twitter) have played a significant role in the story of social media as a force for political dissent. Twitter was a key player in the Arab Spring movement, providing both a rallying point and a megaphone for critics of repressive regimes to share concerns and coordinate opposition. Similarly, Telegram has been an essential tool for Russian opposition to Putin’s regime—and Durov himself has been a powerful symbol of free speech, having founded Telegram after refusing Putin’s demand to shut down opposition groups on his first social media platform, VKontakte.

But while social media has been a powerful force for good, it also facilitates significant misconduct, including large-scale drug trafficking and sex crimes. Most countries recognize the difficulty of moderating billions of transactions in real-time, which is why US and EU law generally do not hold platforms accountable for user activity. But platforms are expected to take down illegal content when it is brought to their attention, and to cooperate with government officials investigating wrongdoing on their networks.

That expectation of cooperation lies at the crux of both of last week’s cases. In Telegram’s case, Durov is charged with complicity to enable illicit transactions, reportedly because the company failed to respond to the French government’s request for cooperation into investigations of child sexual abuse imagery and trafficking. In Brazil, on the eve of election season, Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered the suspension of several X accounts suspected of spreading misinformation. To avoid compliance, X owner Elon Musk withdrew the company’s legal representatives from Brazil, which prompted the judge to ban the service nationwide by ordering internet providers (including, amusingly, Musk’s Starlink satellite service) to block all X content and threatening to fine Brazilians who use VPNs to skirt the ban.

The Brazilian case seems the most troubling of the two. Brazil has less robust speech protection than the US —here, an order threatening sanctions to suppress disfavored speech would be unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court’s recent Vullo decision confirmed. But under Musk’s leadership, X has publicly committed to broad speech protection as a universal value. Musk has described de Moraes as a partisan abusing his power to quell opposition speech during an election campaign. And even if this instance is justified, the dangers of government censorship are obvious. Last week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed remorse at voluntarily complying with similar requests by the US government during the pandemic, as it stifled free inquiry. To protect specifically against government manipulation of information markets, X is testing the limits of Brazil’s ability to silence speech with which it disagrees—much as the US did with Radio Free Europe during the Cold War.

The Telegram case is less sympathetic. Few would argue that a company should enable child sexual abuse by shielding perpetrators from justice. But the arrest of a company executive is a draconian sanction that governments have rarely deployed before. By crossing this line, France makes it easier for other states to pressure executives personally to cooperate with other investigations—such as, perhaps, punishing online “hate speech” or political opponents. Moreover, the French indictment blames in part Telegram’s willingness to encrypt user communications. Telegram boasts that encryption helps protect user privacy, in part to maximize the platform’s utility as a tool of political dissent. And while its encryption differs from WhatsApp, iMessage, and its peers in important ways, Telegram’s position is not far from that of Apple, which touts “privacy by design” and famously wouldn’t or couldn’t comply with FBI demands to unlock a suspected shooter’s iPhone after a deadly terrorist incident in San Bernardino.

The Telegram and X incidents should raise important questions in many boardrooms about when companies will comply with government investigations and when they will resist to protect their consumers. Different platforms will draw that line in different places, and this is one significant plane of competition among providers. Telegram and X have built reputations as networks that respect privacy and foster free speech online. Durov’s arrest and Brazil’s ban raise the costs of pursuing such strategies and at the margin could chill platform incentives to protect user speech against government interference.

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