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. Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...

Result of Guardian Australia experiment aligns with research showing social media automatically delivers troubling content to young men, largely without oversight * Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast 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. Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...