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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Tag - World news
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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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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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