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. Continue reading...

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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. Continue reading...

Meta rules that blanket ban on pro-Palestine slogan would hinder free speech Meta’s content moderation board has backed the company’s decision to allow Facebook posts containing the phrase “From the River to the Sea” after ruling that a blanket ban on the pro-Palestine slogan would hinder free speech. The Oversight Board reviewed three cases involving Facebook posts that featured “From the River to the Sea” and found they did not break Meta’s rules involving restrictions on hate speech and incitement, while an outright ban on the phrase would interfere with political speech in “unacceptable ways”. Continue reading...

Fall overnight comes after it shrinks by $279bn on Tuesday in biggest one-day drop in value by US company * Business live – latest news Shares in the AI chip designer Nvidia have continued to slide overnight after a report said US authorities were ramping up an investigation into whether the company had breached competition laws. The company’s shares fell 2.4% in after-hours trading, exacerbating a near-10% drop in the regular trading session that slashed its value by $279bn (£212bn) to $2.6tn, marking the largest one-day drop in history for a US company. Continue reading...

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Guidelines also stipulate teenagers should have no more than three hours of screen time a day Children under the age of two should not be exposed to any screens whatsoever and teenagers should have no more than three hours of screen time a day, according to guidelines announced by health authorities in Sweden. Parents and guardians should think about how they use screens with their children and tell them what they are doing on their phones when they use them in their presence, the advice says. Continue reading...

In recent months, followers of influential liberal bloggers have been interviewed by police as China widens its net of online surveillance Late last year, Duan*, a university student in China, used a virtual private network to jump over China’s great firewall of internet censorship and download social media platform Discord. Overnight he entered a community in which thousands of members with diverse views debated political ideas and staged mock elections. People could join the chat to discuss ideas such as democracy, anarchism and communism. “After all, it’s hard for us to do politics in reality, so we have to do it in a group chat,” Yang Minghao, a popular vlogger, said in a video on YouTube. Continue reading...

Campaign group says firms such as Uber should reveal data on driver miles to help boost wages Uber and other ride-hailing apps should be forced to publish data on drivers’ workloads so that regulators can tackle exploitation and cut carbon emissions, campaigners argue. Analysis by the pressure group Worker Info Exchange suggests drivers for Uber and its smaller rivals may have missed out on more than £1.2bn in wages and costs last year because of the way they are compensated. Continue reading...

Two men flew between New York and London at three times the speed of sound. No other aircraft has since been as fast as the Blackbird SR-71, explains crew member Noel Widdifield On 1 September 1974 two men made the fastest ever journey between New York and London. The astonishing trip – at three times the speed of sound – took less than two hours and set a record that still stands 50 years later. Even the mighty Concorde, which set the record for the fastest commercial transatlantic flight in 1996, straggled in almost an hour behind. Continue reading...