The detainment of the murky messaging service’s founder in France shows online
moguls can no longer act with impunity
On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget
airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French judicial
police were waiting for him. He was duly arrested and whisked away for
interrogation. Four days later he was indicted on 12 charges, including alleged
complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug
trafficking, barred from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision”,
which requires him to check in with the gendarmes twice a week until further
notice.
The mogul in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects
nationalities the way others collect air miles. In fact it turns out that one of
his citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by France’s president,
Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a punishing
daily regime. “After eight hours of tracked sleep,” the Financial Times reports,
“he starts the day ‘without exception’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice
bath. He does not drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and saves time for
meditation.” When not engaged in these demanding activities, he has also found
time to father more than 100 kids as a sperm donor and to rival Elon Musk as a
free-speech extremist.
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Tag - Online abuse
Guidance comes after calls for a total ban for under-16s and a statuary ban on
mobile phone use in schools
Primary school children should not be given smartphones by their parents, one of
the UK’s largest mobile phone operators has warned.
EE is advising parents that children under 11 should be given old-fashioned
brick or “dumb” phones that only allow them to call or text instead.
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Counsellors are receiving an increasing number of calls from young people being
blackmailed over faked indecent images
* National Crime Agency threatens extraditions over rise in sextortion cases
* How west Africa’s online fraudsters moved into sextortion
It was a phone call that has become all too common for Childline counsellors in
recent months.
The 17-year-old boy said he was scared and did not know what to do. He had been
contacted by a “girl” on social media claiming to be his own age and, after an
exchange of messages, had sent her an intimate image. And then the blackmail
demands started.
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Result of Guardian Australia experiment aligns with research showing social
media automatically delivers troubling content to young men, largely without
oversight
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How do the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram affect what you see in your news
feed? To find out, Guardian Australia unleashed them on a completely blank
smartphone linked to a virgin email address.
Three months later, without any input, they were riddled with sexist and
misogynistic content.
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Threat Matrix service monitors social media profiles and flags up death threats,
racism and sexist comments
The All England Lawn Tennis Club is using artificial intelligence for the first
time to protect players at Wimbledon from online abuse.
An AI-driven service monitors players’ public-facing social media profiles and
automatically flags death threats, racism and sexist comments in 35 different
languages.
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