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 - Social media
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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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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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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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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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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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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On Saturday 24 April, the billionaire founder of the Telegram social media and
messaging app, Pavel Durov, was arrested by French authorities as he disembarked
from his private jet in Paris on his way from Azerbaijan. Officials said the
arrest was part of a cybercrime inquiry into criminal activity on the platform
and a lack of cooperation with law enforcement. Durov has since been formally
charged.
Durov, also known as the 'Russian Mark Zuckerberg' for having founded a similar
platform to Zuckerberg’s Facebook in Russia called VKontakte, is a self-styled
champion of free speech and has cultivated a reputation for being unwilling to
work with authorities to censor and more closely control what happens on his
platform. But his arrest has raised important questions about the extent to
which tech executives are responsible for how users employ their social media
networks. Chris Stokel-Walker, a technology journalist, explains the
implications of Durov's arrest for the tech sector
* Telegram CEO charged in France for ‘allowing criminal activity’ on messaging
app
* What the Telegram founder’s arrest means for the regulation of social media
firms
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Pavel Durov, who has French citizenship, faces prosecution over alleged failure
to suppress spread of sexual images of children and calls for violence
The head of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been charged by the French judiciary for
allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app but avoided jail with
a €5m bail.
The Russian-born multi-billionaire, who has French citizenship, was granted
release on condition that he report to a police station twice a week and remain
in France, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement.
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