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...

Transmissions, which plots the story of Joy Division and New Order, returns for a second run. Plus: five of the best sci-fi podcasts • Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here In case you missed it, Serial’s Sarah Koenig was recently interviewed by Fiona Sturges for the Guardian, on 10 years of Serial. It was an intriguing interview about how web sleuths had changed Koenig’s own view of the Adnan Syed case that made her podcast such a huge hit back in 2014. But one section struck me as pretty surprising, if not totally shocking. Good friends and family, Koenig said – “like, even my siblings” – had asked her whether its fourth series, on Guantánamo Bay, had been released yet (it came out in March). “We can speculate about the topic and the quality of it, but I think it’s also just the [pod] universe is completely different,” she added. “There are so many choices. We are in a sea of podcasts.” Serial season four isn’t a whodunnit – Serial hasn’t really done that since its inception, and that first series that hinged on whether Syed had killed his high-school sweetheart Hae Min Lee. Successive outings have also leaned less on the serialisation you might assume from the title, with the Guantánamo series focusing instead on somewhat interlinked stories of life at the notorious US prison camp, rather than one overarching, unfurling narrative. In many ways, it’s kind of become a podcast Ship of Theseus, its elements slowly changing with each season. Still, it’s slightly sad to think that some people may have abandoned it just because it isn’t that same show it was at that very specific moment in time, pre-true crime boom, rather than something that has changed and evolved over a decade. Plus, the Guantánamo series is pretty solid (although, beware – episode eight in particular comes with some deeply upsetting details of sexual assault). Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...

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...

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...

Pavel Durov will probably use French legal disputes to position himself as a champion of free speech, say observers When Pavel Durov came under criticism from Russian regulators over the spread of pornography on the VKontakte social media platform he founded, the tech entrepreneur responded mockingly by changing his Twitter handle from “VK CEO” to “Porn King”. More than a decade later, Durov’s anti-authoritarian stance and hands-off approach to moderation have landed him in more serious trouble. Continue reading...

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”. Continue reading...

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 Continue reading...

The movie megastars contribute to Rebecca Keegan’s irresistible show, A Film We Can’t Refuse. Plus: five of the best outdoors podcasts • Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Far be it for me to define a man by his romantic relationships, but if you’ve heard of Travis Kelce, you may know him more as Taylor Swift’s boyfriend than because he’s an NFL star. He is, however, also a podcaster, and not just any podcaster – he’s just landed a reported $100m deal with the Amazon-owned Wondery for New Heights, the show he hosts with his brother Jason (a former NFL star), which has become one of the most popular sports podcasts in the world since it launched in 2022. It’s a lot of cash, especially for two already-wealthy men at a time when every month seems to bring a headline about some podcast studio or another shedding staff and slashing budgets. At the same time, it could prove to be a shrewd investment, with Kelce and Swift rarely out of the headlines. It does have the mad effect of making Joe Rogan’s estimated $250m deal with Spotify – the biggest of its kind – seem a little low by comparison, though, or even Call Her Daddy’s $100m contract with SiriusXM. Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...