Users say harmful content from accounts they do not follow appears even after
requests to block it
Debbie was scrolling through X in April when some unwelcome posts appeared on
her feed. One showed a photo of someone who was visibly underweight asking
whether they were thin enough. In another, a user wanted to compare how few
calories they were eating each day.
Debbie, who did not want to give her last name, is 37 years old and was first
diagnosed with bulimia when she was 16. She did not follow either of the
accounts behind the posts, which belonged to a group with more than 150,000
members on the social media site.
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Tag - Media
Pavel Durov said the feature – which has had issues with bots and scammers –
would be replaced
The chief executive of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has announced the messaging app
will improve moderation on the platform and has removed some features that have
been used for illegal activity.
The app’s founder unveiled the changes on Friday hours after calling his arrest
by the French authorities last month “misguided”. Durov has since been charged
with allegedly allowing criminal activity on the app.
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CMA says tech company has ‘abused its dominant position’ to the detriment of
publishers and advertisers
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The UK competition watchdog has accused Google of anti-competitive behaviour in
the market for buying and selling ads on websites, in a move that follows
similar investigations in the US and the EU.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had found that Google has
“abused its dominant position” in online advertising to the detriment of
thousands of UK publishers and advertisers.
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Transmissions, which plots the story of Joy Division and New Order, returns for
a second run. Plus: five of the best sci-fi podcasts
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In case you missed it, Serial’s Sarah Koenig was recently interviewed by Fiona
Sturges for the Guardian, on 10 years of Serial. It was an intriguing interview
about how web sleuths had changed Koenig’s own view of the Adnan Syed case that
made her podcast such a huge hit back in 2014. But one section struck me as
pretty surprising, if not totally shocking. Good friends and family, Koenig said
– “like, even my siblings” – had asked her whether its fourth series, on
Guantánamo Bay, had been released yet (it came out in March). “We can speculate
about the topic and the quality of it, but I think it’s also just the [pod]
universe is completely different,” she added. “There are so many choices. We are
in a sea of podcasts.”
Serial season four isn’t a whodunnit – Serial hasn’t really done that since its
inception, and that first series that hinged on whether Syed had killed his
high-school sweetheart Hae Min Lee. Successive outings have also leaned less on
the serialisation you might assume from the title, with the Guantánamo series
focusing instead on somewhat interlinked stories of life at the notorious US
prison camp, rather than one overarching, unfurling narrative. In many ways,
it’s kind of become a podcast Ship of Theseus, its elements slowly changing with
each season. Still, it’s slightly sad to think that some people may have
abandoned it just because it isn’t that same show it was at that very specific
moment in time, pre-true crime boom, rather than something that has changed and
evolved over a decade. Plus, the Guantánamo series is pretty solid (although,
beware – episode eight in particular comes with some deeply upsetting details of
sexual assault).
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Platform will ensure algorithms do not keep pushing similar content to young
viewers, even though it does not breach guidelines
YouTube is to stop recommending videos to teenagers that idealise specific
fitness levels, body weights or physical features, after experts warned such
content could be harmful if viewed repeatedly.
The platform will still allow 13- to 17-year-olds to view the videos, but its
algorithms will not push young users down related content “rabbit holes”
afterwards.
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Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, I and many others have been looking for
alternatives. Who wants to share a platform with the likes of Andrew Tate and
Tommy Robinson?
I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not
wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man
like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff
began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my
life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone
got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their
secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told
the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that
wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.
It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became
something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the
rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000
followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention
per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie
and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often
enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down
and the rest are all selling the same thing.
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Millions of users shut out and 500,000 switch to rival platform Bluesky as
providers enact supreme court ban
One of the world’s most popular social networks, X, has gone offline in Brazil –
the country with the fifth largest digital population – after Elon Musk’s
refusal to comply with local laws saw it blocked by the supreme court.
Millions of Brazilian X users found themselves unable to access the network on
Saturday morning as internet providers and mobile phone companies began to
enforce the ban.
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Pavel Durov will probably use French legal disputes to position himself as a
champion of free speech, say observers
When Pavel Durov came under criticism from Russian regulators over the spread of
pornography on the VKontakte social media platform he founded, the tech
entrepreneur responded mockingly by changing his Twitter handle from “VK CEO” to
“Porn King”.
More than a decade later, Durov’s anti-authoritarian stance and hands-off
approach to moderation have landed him in more serious trouble.
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Social media platform to be blocked by ISPs because it did not appoint legal
representative in allotted time
The Brazilian supreme court has ordered that X be suspended in the country after
the social media platform failed to meet a deadline to appoint a legal
representative in the country.
Late on Friday afternoon, Justice Alexandre de Moraes – who has been engaged in
a dispute with X’s owner, Elon Musk, since April – ordered the “immediate,
complete and total suspension of X’s operations” in the country, “until all
court orders … are complied with, fines are duly paid, and a new legal
representative for the company is appointed in the country”.
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The movie megastars contribute to Rebecca Keegan’s irresistible show, A Film We
Can’t Refuse. Plus: five of the best outdoors podcasts
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Far be it for me to define a man by his romantic relationships, but if you’ve
heard of Travis Kelce, you may know him more as Taylor Swift’s boyfriend than
because he’s an NFL star.
He is, however, also a podcaster, and not just any podcaster – he’s just landed
a reported $100m deal with the Amazon-owned Wondery for New Heights, the show he
hosts with his brother Jason (a former NFL star), which has become one of the
most popular sports podcasts in the world since it launched in 2022. It’s a lot
of cash, especially for two already-wealthy men at a time when every month seems
to bring a headline about some podcast studio or another shedding staff and
slashing budgets. At the same time, it could prove to be a shrewd investment,
with Kelce and Swift rarely out of the headlines. It does have the mad effect of
making Joe Rogan’s estimated $250m deal with Spotify – the biggest of its kind –
seem a little low by comparison, though, or even Call Her Daddy’s $100m contract
with SiriusXM.
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