Millions are rejecting the culture-war hotspots of the major social media sites in favour of apps dedicated to activities they enjoy, while bonding with their fellow users

Singletons looking to shack up with their soulmates online have relied on two key routes in the past decade or so: take your chance on dating apps, or befriend as many mutuals as possible on social media, in the hope that you find the one.

But some have found a third way, using services such as Goodreads and Strava to meet partners with whom they hope to spend the rest of their lives. Those couples proved to be trendsetters. So-called hobby apps – built around activites such as running, reading or movie-going – are having a moment, and not just for love.

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.

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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Journalists and other writers are employed to improve the quality of chatbot replies. The irony of working for an industry that may well make their craft redundant is not lost on them

For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company.

That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.

Both creator and fan accounts on the platform grew 30% during ‘strong year’ in which its users spent more than £5bn

The owner of the subscription platform OnlyFans was paid a $472m (£359m) dividend last year, taking his payouts from the business since 2020 to more than $1bn.

Leonid Radvinsky has received a total of just under $1.3bn over the past four years from the site, which offers users subscriptions to material provided by creators and is synonymous with adult content.

Amazon says the device’s pro-Harris answers were due to software errors, but conservatives allege a liberal bias

Amazon ’s Alexa voice assistant has caused an uproar among conservatives after viral videos showed the device giving supportive answers about voting for Kamala Harris , while refusing to respond to similar questions about Donald Trump.

The issue was due to a software update intended to improve the quality of Alexa’s functions and its artificial intelligence operations, according to leaked documents obtained by the Washington Post .

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 .

CMA says tech company has ‘abused its dominant position’ to the detriment of publishers and advertisers

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The UK competition watchdog has accused Google of anti-competitive behaviour in the market for buying and selling ads on websites, in a move that follows similar investigations in the US and the EU.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had found that Google has “abused its dominant position” in online advertising to the detriment of thousands of UK publishers and advertisers.

Experts are issuing stern warnings about business support for Trump – it could backfire badly and endanger democracy

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, a growing number of billionaires, tech titans and venture capitalists are backing Donald Trump’s campaign for president, among them Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity fund, Steve Wynn, the casino tycoon, Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager, and Marc Andreessen, a leading venture capitalist.

But many business school professors and historians are issuing stern warnings about this business support for Trump, saying that backing him could backfire badly for business and endanger America’s democracy. These professors caution that corporate America – along with everyone else – should be hugely concerned about a candidate who has talked of being a dictator on day one , terminating the constitution , and weaponizing the justice department to exact revenge against his critics.