Closing post
Time to wrap up….
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.
In a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, he said the messaging app was “committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise”.
The changes announced by Durov included removing the app’s People Nearby feature which he said had “issues with bots and scammers” and replacing it with Businesses Nearby, featuring legitimate businesses; and disabling media uploads on the app’s blogging tool, Telegraph, which Durov said was being “misused by anonymous actors”.
Durov added that Telegram’s nearly 1 billion users had been let down by a minority.
Durov has also called his recent arrest ‘“misguided”, and defended Telegram.
US employers added 142,000 jobs last month, the labor department announced on Friday, in one of the year’s most closely watched economic news releases.
The release comes as the US Federal Reserve prepares to cut interest rates for the first time since March 2020, and November’s election puts a spotlight on the state of the US economy.
The reading for August was shy of the average forecast increase of 163,000 jobs by economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
The weaker-than-forecast job creation has caused wobbles in the markets – the S&P 500 share index is now down 1.7%, and the oil price has slipped to its lowest since May 2023.
In London, the FTSE 100 lost 60 points to close at 8181 points, its 6th daily fall in a row.
The bond markets currently indicate there’s a 75% chance of a small, 25 basis point, cut to US interest rates this month, and a 25% chance of a larger, 50-basis point cut.
In the UK, house prices hit a two-year high last month, in the latest sign that the property market has recovered from the aftermath of Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget that sent borrowing costs soaring, according to the latest figures from Halifax.
The lender said the cost of an average house increased by 0.3% last month, after rising 0.9% in July, pushing the average cost of a property to £292,505.
This is the highest level since August 2022, the month before Truss’s disastrous mini-budget.
Updated
Incidentally, Bloomberg reported this morning that the European Union is quietly gathering evidence to support the case that Telegram should be subject to the bloc’s strictest content-moderation regulations.
They reported:
Officials at the EU’s executive arm are using data from several web traffic monitoring firms to establish that Telegram’s social-media platform draws more than 45 million monthly active users, a threshold that would subject it to extra scrutiny under the bloc’s new Digital Services Act, according to a European Commission official.
More here: EU Builds Case to Place Telegram Under Stricter Content Scrutiny
