French prosecutors issued preliminary charges against Pavel Durov, the boss of Telegram, for allegedly failing to tackle criminal activity taking place over the messaging app, which has 900m users worldwide. The arrest of Mr Durov in Paris came amid worsening relations between governments and social-media companies. In America Mark Zuckerberg accused the Biden administration of pressing Meta to censor certain content across its platforms about covid-19 during the pandemic. And Brazil’s Supreme Court threatened to shut down X in a row with Elon Musk, the platform’s owner.