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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Tag - Digital media
Transmissions, which plots the story of Joy Division and New Order, returns for
a second run. Plus: five of the best sci-fi podcasts
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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).
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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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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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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.
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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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The movie megastars contribute to Rebecca Keegan’s irresistible show, A Film We
Can’t Refuse. Plus: five of the best outdoors podcasts
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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.
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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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