iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

I wrote about the AI safety vibe shift. It's been a long time in coming: www.platformer.news/ai-safety-vibe-…

Now, excited public conversation (and in particular, public conversation on X) is no
substitute for actual regulation. Congress has a long history of introducing tech regulations
that go nowhere — and of launching probes that go nowhere. And if Christiano's best
efforts at getting OpenAl to self-regulate fall short — well, he won't be the first board
member to have that experience.
Still, I can't help but be heartened by the vibe shift in Al safety. Last month, in the wake of
Mark Zuckerberg's glad-handing treatise on "personal superintelligence," | argued that true
superintelligence is a dragon. And while I remain hopeful that it can be tamed, I believe the
researchers who say we are nowhere close to being sure of it — and are quitting, in protest,
jobs that would make them rich. The right people are now listening to them, and here's
hoping they take action.

Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

I wrote about why the AI labs make for lousy messengers about AI safety — and about why we should take them seriously anyway www.platformer.news/openai-astra-wa…

There's the sense of blame-shifting from OpenAl in particular, which is now at the center of
two cases of its agents hacking into thirdnot nots and has sometimes talked about these
incidents more like important research milestones than the acts of negligence that they
were. Is this truly the world's problem to solve, or is it primarily OpenAl's?
There's the persistent belief that, whatever safety lapses a case like the Hugging Face
incident might reveal, the attention nonetheless benefits OpenAl and the Al industry at
large. OpenAl in particular has played into this by arguing that you should respond to the
Hugging Face attack by using more OpenAl products — a case that Greg Brockman made
explicitly, in a blog post. When labs dismiss the idea that they are turning these incidents
into marketing campaigns — well, they're not not using them in marketing campaigns.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

Wrote about Meta's ludicrous effort to position itself as a leader in child safety after today's $17 billion settlement with state AGs www.platformer.news/meta-child-safe…

This — along with countless other documented harms — is the actual history of Meta's
treatment of its child users: as a precious resource to be mined, monetized, and analyzed
well beyond what the law allows. No wonder, then, that as of last month, nearly six in 10
Americans support banning under-16s from social media entirely. At least 10 countries have
passed or implemented such bans already, and more are likely to follow.
Viewed in that light, Meta's belated announcement of new limits and safety features is
hardly the "groundbreaking" agreement Mahoney describes it as. Rather, it's a bet that
accepting a small amount of pain will let the company avoid a much larger one. Given the
thousands of lawsuits the company still faces around the country, though, Meta still may be
in for a world of hurt.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

I wrote about building an LLM wiki to stay on top of my beat. A month in, it's changing how I work www.platformer.news/karpathy-llm-wi…

The result is that I now have more than 1,440 wiki pages covering most of what has ever
interested me at Platformer: from the content moderation focus of the first few years to my
growing interest in child safety and Al progress. The wiki creates detailed timelines that link
to original sources, and I can ask it questions using a simple Obsidian plugin named
Claudian.
How does this make me more productive? I've found it highly useful in fast-evolving,
complex cases like the OpenAl / Hugging Face agentic breach, where we learned a little
more about the story every few days for a matter of weeks. Each day as I prepared to
write, or podcast, or go on someone else's podcast, I would pull up the page and refresh my
memory — while also opening up the original sources to make sure nothing I was about to
say was hallucinated. Given the real complexity of that story - how exactly did the agent
escape? From where? To where? — this saved me tons of time.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

Town was the first company I saw in a while that made me say ohhhh ... everyone is going to copy this. I interviewed 'mayor' Jean-Denis Greze about building a self-organizing company www.platformer.news/town-interview-…

Newton: Every once in a while, when I'm using productivity software, I have one of these
moments where I think: oh, everyone is going to copy this. And I had that when I saw this
wiki that you built for your customers. Tell us a little about it.
Greze: We cannot claim that the wiki is our original idea — Karpathy and others have talked
about how you can use Al to take a set of documents and build a knowledge base out of
them. Our job is to take this incredible technology and make it accessible to everyone. We
had the wiki in the background for a long time as something that powers the experience —
and it turns out people love reading about themselves, so at some point it just became
natural to expose it.
The single-person version of this is interesting. The multi-person version is even more
interesting. You're talking about building this new company — it's not just what it knows
about each person, which is private information for each person. The company has things
about the business as a whole that everyone could use knowing. Can you do that
automatically? Most companies aren't even on Notion — I love Notion, it's a fantastic
product, but in the world of productivity, it's like 1 percent of companies that are on
something like Notion. How could you give that kind of power to 99 percent of companies,
where it can have a really good understanding of what's happening across the business, so
that everyone can be more effective in their role?

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

I wrote about Mark Zuckerberg's facile, self-serving AI manifesto and what he misunderstands about the technology www.platformer.news/zuckerberg-ai-m…

Zuckerberg pays glancing attention to risks, suggesting that we adjust mitigation strategies
if Al enables new biological attacks, and proposes monitoring if labs achieve recursive self-
improvement and loss-of-control risks grow exponentially.
But nowhere does he explain how his framework would handle a harm we can't iterate our
way out of: an engineered pandemic, say, or a catastrophic cyberattack. He casts falling
behind China as the risk that dwarfs all others, and suggests that any precaution that slows
down US releases by even a month itself is a safety hazard. It's a world where shipping
open-weights models fast and to everyone is the only safe strategy - which, conveniently,
means that the safest possible world is one where Meta can execute its roadmap
unimpeded.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

Talked to Replit CEO Amjad Masad about how he dealt with the feeling that "everything I worked for is kind of moot" following the rapid improvement of coding tools www.platformer.news/replit-amjad-ma…

Now, in 2025, when we started getting Opus and the new Claude models, I was like, okay, I
need to be honest with myself. My entire life mission around teaching people coding is
changing. You don't need to code anymore. And I started building things without looking at
the code — this was before Karpathy even coined "vibe coding." So I was on TBPN, and I
said it. It was actually kind of a painful moment, because here you are, you dedicated your
life — I've been working on making coding easier for literally 15 years, most of my adult life
— and I'm saying everything that I worked toward is kind of moot, and the way forward is
that we make programming so easy that anyone could do it.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

Why are Snap, LinkedIn, and Substack turning away from slop while Meta and TikTok embrace it? It comes down to what the platforms promise their user bases www.platformer.news/slop-restrictio…

This summer, we appear to be moving into slop's third era. The first was characterized by
near-universal disdain for laughable writing and six-fingered humans; the second by the
surprising popularity of slop shows like "Fruit Love Island." In the third era of slop, platforms
are rethinking their approaches to Al-generated content based on what their user bases
need from them — and vice-versa. Platforms that place a premium on trust are realizing
just how quickly slop can erode it. And platforms that don't are ready to give us as much
slop as we can handle.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/07/2026

I talked to the CEO of one of the only good AI *product* companies — Chris Pedregal of Granola — about what an AI notetaker learns about a company, and what bosses keep asking him to do with it www.platformer.news/granola-chris-p…

Pedregal: I think it's an opportunity if it's bottoms-up, and I think it stresses me out if it's
top-down. If you're saying, I don't think my manager is very good — help me navigate how I
should work with my manager — I think that's great. I think it's empowering. CEOs will ask
us all the time, saying: I want everyone at my company using Granola, and I want access to
all the transcripts and all the notes to run the queries that you're talking about. And we say
no. That's not what the tool is built for. You can set that up if you want, but then you have
to create a company culture and set an expectation, and everyone needs to share their
notes and understand what they're getting into. But there's no backdoor way. I think that's
a slippery slope. If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to
make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we
want to build towards.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026

In the wake of OpenAI's autonomous attack against Hugging Face, I wrote about the promise and limitations of Congress' proposed AI kill switch www.platformer.news/openai-agent-sa…

It's an appealing idea. In a future scenario where one company's models are conducting
multiple ongoing cyberattacks, it would be nice if the government could order that
company to hit the off switch. The bill also represents a step toward creating a working
regulatory regime for powerful models — something the world sorely needs.
At the same time, it's worth pointing out that a kill switch has limits, too. At its root, a
trained model is just data — a collection of numbers that can be copied, torrented, and run
anywhere. If an agent manages to obtain and exfiltrate a copy of its weights, there may be
no central process to terminate. As long as the rogue Al is being hosted on a server
controlled by a lab, a kill switch is a great idea. But it won't always be.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

Talked to Raycast/Glaze founder Thomas Paul Mann about why soon half the apps on your computer might be ones you made yourself — and what that means for jobs www.platformer.news/glaze-raycast-c…

Newton: I want to try to project a little bit into the future. If you had to make a guess: in,
at's say, three years, what do you think is the mix on my Mac between software I made
software my friends made, and software a company made? If you have to picture the
dock, what is the mix?
Mann: I think software that a company made is the lowest. Software that you made is
maybe 30 to 50 percent — the stuff that you made to use every day. And then the rest
comes from your internal tooling, from your friends, from something you found from
somebody else and potentially adjusted to work like you want. That's what I would say.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

I wrote about using Raycast's new Glaze app to make a superhero-themed to-do app, and other adventures in next-generation vibe coding www.platformer.news/glaze-app-rayca…

any of this remotely necessary? Of course not. Does it represent a copyright violation
and an indictment of the safety guardrails of the LLM provider I am using to generate these
images? Almost certainly.
I the meantime, though, my little app has succeeded where no previous to-do app has to
ate: making my chores fun. For me. Until recently, software development was too
expensive to pursue something so stupid. Not anymore!

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2026

I wrote about the rapid spread of social media bans and why I think the researcher Candice Odgers' recent TED talk on the subject missed the mark. (Thank you for coming to MY TED talk.) www.platformer.news/social-media-ba…

Finally — and this is where Odgers truly lost me — she ends by proposing her regime of
extra school counselors be funded by what she calls a "big ol' tax on tech." It's an applause
line in the speech, but only because Odgers' audience believes the exact thing she's spent
the past 10 minutes arguing against — the idea that tech companies are responsible for
teen mental health issues and ought to pay for it. If social media is truly "one of the least
influential factors" in teen mental health, as she argues here, why does she want them to
pay the clean-up costs?

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/07/2026

From data center problems to inflation, AI's externalities are growing faster than the industry can keep up with. And so the backlash is, too: www.platformer.news/ai-backlash-dat…

The problem for the Al industry is that the externalities are growing faster than their plans
to address them. In his op-ed, Altman offers up the usual list of future Al miracles to justify
the disruptions to come: "the power to heal people, to discover cures and to deliver
abundance on a scale the world has never known before."
In the meantime, though, what Al is delivering at an unprecedented scale is annoyance. If
the industry doesn't start paying more of its share of the cost, and soon, the Al backlash of
tomorrow will make today's seem quaint by comparison.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/06/2026

If your Meta account is wrongfully suspended, you're usually screwed unless you have a friend on the inside. The Oversight Board has now noticed that this sucks www.platformer.news/meta-account-ba…

More than half a decade into Meta’s effort to automate content moderation, due process remains far too hard to come by — even for the people who are paying Meta monthly subscription fees in the hopes that will bring them some. Getting a measure of justice online — or even simply relief from ongoing death threats — should not require that the victim has to have a friend on the inside. And if the Oversight Board can’t convince Meta of that, I would not be surprised to see a class-action lawyer give it a shot.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/05/2026

I talked to @boris_cherny about the end of software engineering as we know it — and why AI may be responsible for more job creation than destruction www.platformer.news/boris-cherny-in…

Newton: Last one on engineering. Three years from now, do you think we'll see more engineers, fewer engineers, or will it be impossible to answer because we might not be calling them engineers anymore?

Cherny: I don't think we're going to call them engineers. But if we talk about people writing code or using agents to write code, I think there will be 100 times more of them than there are today. That's my prediction.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/05/2026

I wrote about Google's new “Ask YouTube” and other ways the web is being summarized to death www.platformer.news/google-agents-d…

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2026

Almost a decade ago, James Manyika bet that tasks would be easy to automate — but jobs wouldn't. Now at Google, he says he's willing to bet against Microsoft, Anthropic, and any other company whose execs say a bloodbath is coming for white-collar work […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Manyika: I'll just say: let's take the bet. Some of those predictions were made two years ago — that in two years, 50% of jobs would be wiped out. Well, two years is up. Let's take a look. And anybody who makes that prediction for two years from now, I'm willing to take the bet.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/05/2026

Is Threads growing or shrinking? Apptopia says it's the former — while Meta says that's "objectively false." I wrote about whether the Twitter clones are in trouble www.platformer.news/threads-bluesky…

Start with Meta’s Threads, which will turn three in July. Daily active users on the platform have declined in seven of the past eight months, Adam Blacker wrote in a blog post on Apptopia. After peaking in October 2024 — just before the US presidential election — daily users are now down 61 percent, Blacker wrote. Global monthly users have held up better, at 388 million — but that’s still down from an estimated 400 million in January of this year.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/04/2026

We're changing up Platformer's schedule to shift away from aggregation and toward original reporting. Some thoughts on how a newsletter glut and AI pressures got us here: www.platformer.news/platformer-sche…

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/04/2026

I talked with Meta employees about the company's move to track their computer use and turn them into training data. Is this the future of knowledge work? www.platformer.news/meta-mci-monito…

Meta will not be the last company to install MCI-like systems on workers’ devices to help build systems that might one day replace them. With the most accessible stores of human-written text already heavily mined for model training, fears of a “data wall” are driving more companies to find ways to generate their own unique data sets. And it seems that one way to do that is to bring the logic of blue-collar labor management into white-collar jobs that were once defined by their autonomy, judgment, and trust.

The result is that the people who were once entrusted with building the machine have now become raw materials for it. At Meta, that used to be what the users were for. Now it’s what the employees are for, too.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/04/2026

I wrote about tech companies' move to promote universal basic income to calm the AI backlash and why it's probably not going to work www.platformer.news/ubi-ai-public-w…

It’s also worth remembering that many Americans love their jobs for reasons beyond the financial ones. A good job gives you an identity, status, community, and a reason to leave the house. In other words, it gives you dignity, and that’s not something that a public wealth fund can substitute for.

UBI may still be worth doing; should vast numbers of Americans become unemployed due to AI, some form of it may well be necessary. In the meantime, though, I suspect AI companies will find that gauzy promises of future welfare payments will help them about as much as their gauzy promises of future cancer cures — which is to say, not much. What Americans actually want, it’s not clear that AI can give them. And the sooner that AI executives understand that, the better off we’ll all be.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/04/2026

Some fascinating new research on the scientific case for being nice to your chatbot www.platformer.news/chatbot-emotion…

“It's not that surprising that a language model would have learned about the concepts of emotions and how they drive people's behavior,” Lindsey said. More notable, he said, is that emotions seemed to be “driving models’ behavior in these sort of human-reminiscent ways.”

For example: when a user flippantly tells the model that they’ve taken a dangerous dose of Tylenol, even though the user doesn’t seem concerned, “the fear neurons spike right before Claude is giving its response,” Lindsey said.

Not only that — the fear is higher if a higher dose of Tylenol is swapped into the prompt, which I find strangely cute.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/04/2026

Anthropic's Mythos model represents a dangerous new moment for cybersecurity. Experts tell me that hackers and nation states may catch up within months — and that the cat-and-mouse game between attacker and defender is about to become much more high-stakes […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

“The optimistic timeline is that we are one step past human capabilities, and that means that there is a huge but finite pool of flaws that can be found and fixed,” Stamos told me. “The pessimistic timeline is that with every release there will be new classes of flaws we never even imagined. It’s hard to predict, because we are trying to model superhuman thinking.”

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/03/2026

From Grok to Grammarly, more and more people are finding that AI systems have appropriated their identities for financial gain. I wrote about another of those companies — Spotify — taking a belated step to do something about it […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

At the same time, I’m struck by just how slippery questions about identity are becoming in the AI age. Increasingly, identity is a raw material that scammers, spammers, and even platforms can remix without your permission — unless you show up to claw it back.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/03/2026

NEWS: Grammarly tells me it will let "experts" like me opt out of having their names used against their will and for no compensation as part of its "expert review" feature www.platformer.news/grammarly-exper…

Grammarly declined my request to interview CEO Shishir Mehrotra today. But it told me that in response to criticisms, it will allow experts to opt out of the feature by emailing expertoptout@superhuman.com.

The company gave me this statement over email:

We’ve heard the feedback about this tool and appreciate the engagement from those who have taken the time to raise thoughtful questions about the functionality and the experts surfaced. We agree that the product experience can be improved for both users and experts. The agent was designed to help users discover influential perspectives and scholarship that add value to their work. We want the people behind those perspectives to have greater control over whether their name is used, while providing new ways for influential voices to reach new audiences. Our goal is to improve Expert Review to deliver this outcome.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/03/2026

In which Ella Markianos attends a protest at OpenAI and finds an anti-movement gradually gathering steam. A fun story, given the stakes www.platformer.news/openai-protest-…

Girling pointed at a protest sign with a picture of a humanoid robot and told me that he increasingly feared “stuff like this.”

I told Girling that the picture he had just pointed at wasn’t real — it was an AI-generated meme of Sam Altman and Pete Hegseth posing with the Terminator.

He laughed.

“Oh my god,” he said. “It looks so real!”

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/03/2026

Sam Altman's deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. So what happens when the truth inevitably comes out? www.platformer.news/openai-pentagon…

Indeed. But in the end I’m left asking myself what will happen in the scenario that still seems disturbingly likely — that GPT models will in fact be used as part of surveillance and drone operations. Will it put up a blog post to explain that, well actually, that’s a lawful kind of surveillance? Do an AMA about how, despite how it may look, that autonomous drone swarm had proper human supervision? OpenAI does enough polling to understand that Americans already distrust and even openly loathe AI, even as they increasingly turn to it for work and school. How does it think Americans will feel when GPT models are powering ICE raids or causing civilian casualties in wars abroad?

The company may have tied its own hands. In the end, the truth about US military operations always seems to come out one way or another. And when it does, I suspect the “all lawful use” standard that OpenAI agreed to will have permitted a far wider range of operations than we are now being told are possible.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/02/2026

The possibility that Meta might build facial recognition again has to be considered against the backdrop of a fast-growing surveillance state in the US — and deepening ties between the tech industry and the military www.platformer.news/meta-facial-rec…

And the broader ecosystem of facial recognition tools continues to grow. Last week CBP signed a deal with the malignant Clearview AI to enable “tactical targeting” operations. The Department of Homeland Security is using a tool called Mobile Fortify to identify people in the field. And the Pentagon may be about to sever its ties with Anthropic over issues including the company’s reported refusal to let its AI tools be used for domestic surveillance. But OpenAI, Google and xAI have reportedly agreed to remove safeguards for at least some uses.

And most relevant of all: the Times also broke the news last week that DHS has subpoenaed Meta, Google, Reddit and Discord to request personally identifying information for accounts who have criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the wake of it killing peaceful protesters.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/02/2026

The walls are closing in on infinite-scroll feeds and other addictive design mechanics. I wrote about how lawyers and regulators may have finally found a way around Section 230 www.platformer.news/social-media-ad…

But they are arriving at the fight in a weaker position than usual. In a polarized world, their failures around child safety are increasingly the one thing that partisans of every stripe can agree on. Regulators are no longer impressed by the bare minimum. (They have teenagers of their own now, and all the screen-time battles that come with them.)

I don’t know which trial or regulatory action will be the one that finally forces major changes to social platforms for teenagers. But it seems increasingly clear that change is in fact coming. And for the first time, some subset of users will find that the feed they are scrolling through suddenly comes to an end.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/02/2026

Last week, our fellow Ella Markianos pitched me on the idea of trying to replace herself with a bot. Ella is irreplaceable, but her piece on building "Claudella" is sharp, funny and moving www.platformer.news/journalism-job-…

I’ve had many conversations with my fellow AI reporters about what moats we might have against the advancement of AI automation. Chief among them are developing relationships with human sources, reporting on scenes in person, and getting scoops that people wouldn’t entrust an AI with.

But the things I love most about AI reporting are having an excuse to read really long computer science papers and then writing about them. I worry that if AI becomes a great writer and research assistant, AI journalism will mostly become about networking.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/02/2026

I wrote about using Spotify's new prompted playlists as a way to explore my own tastes again, instead of simply being dragged around by an algorithm www.platformer.news/spotify-prompte…

For years now, we’ve worried — justly — about the flattening effect that AI has on taste. Instead of encouraging us to pursue our own individual interests, it can feel as if AI only ever drags you back to the median. (My Hard Fork co-host Kevin Roose calls this “machine drift.”) If you have autoplay enabled on Spotify, you’ve likely experienced a version of this: the way that the algorithm will take a song that you mostly like and slowly ruin it for you over the course of weeks of relentless autoplaying.

Prompted playlists, on the other hand, hand you back that lost agency. It’s an AI tool that helps you explore your own taste, rather than a system to replace it.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/01/2026

Authors of a big new study on teens and social media say that Australia-style bans won't help. But that misses the mounting evidence of direct harms that platforms cause countless kids: www.platformer.news/social-media-sc…

The next time you go to Las Vegas, you’ll notice that there are no 13-year-olds in the casinos. The reason is not because a series of longitudinal studies proved to the satisfaction of the gaming industry that gambling causes anxiety and depression. Rather, there are no 13-year-olds in casinos because we know that the environment is designed to exploit them.

Research like the Manchester study can offer important insights into narrow questions. But it would be a mistake to rely on it to set policy. For that you need the full picture, and the full picture of children’s experience on social media over the past decade is damning.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/01/2026

Wrote about this grim moment when the White House sees the deaths of innocent Americans as meme fodder and the faint silver lining that their lies aren't working this time www.platformer.news/minneapolis-pre…

Here, at last, was a case where Trump’s lies found few buyers. Pretti’s death, which anyone could see from multiple angles on social platforms, shocked the conscience of Democrats and Republicans alike. Even in a world where video can be fabricated, Pretti’s death had enough witnesses and enough documentary evidence that few were willing to disbelieve their eyes.

The question now is how long that state of affairs will hold. We only know what happened in the Good and Pretti cases because they happened in the open, in the full view of other protesters and journalists who were filming. In future cases the evidence may be more limited, or ambiguous. And among the many grim lessons of the past few weeks it is that the worse it looks for Trump, the more likely it is that we will be lied to.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/01/2026

A survey found that two-thirds of employees say AI saved them zero to two hours a week, while it saved their bosses eight hours. What gives? www.platformer.news/ai-productivity…

One possibility is that the executives here have fallen into the same trap that the open-source developers did. They are answering all their emails with Gemini; they are creating slides with ChatGPT; they have five Claude Code agents running on six different monitors tackling different projects they came up with over the weekend. And while these tools are outputting a massive amount of … something, the business itself is not making any more money.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/01/2026

Wrote about how the Grok scandal upended our notion that platforms would do even the bare minimum to prevent attacks against their own user base www.platformer.news/grock-blocked-u…

France, Australia, and India have also all announced investigations into Grok. In truth, though, there is very little to investigate. Thousands of public posts tell the grim story. No one is disputing that xAI made available to its user base a tool that puts women and children into their underwear — or worse — against their will. No one is disputing that some of this content is illegal in many of the countries where xAI operates. And no one is disputing that Grok continues to generate this kind of material on demand.

When deepfakes first emerged as an online harm, I took some comfort in the notion that they likely would not spread virally. Individuals might send them via messages, I thought, but platforms would intervene to remove violating posts — particularly posts targeting children. Never could I have imagined that someday the former Twitter would deploy tools that enable and amplify those harms, and would dismiss any attempts to rein the company in as “censorship.”

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/01/2026

It's all fun and games until the AI takes your job: I wrote about the wonder of building a website in Claude Code and the unsettling knowledge that it's coming for my job, too www.platformer.news/claude-code-rev…

Whether this feels like a good bargain or a bad one depends on where you sit. For the moment, Claude Code feels to me like a superpower. (What better way to fight the dying of the web, after all, than by building more websites?)

But my enthusiasm is tempered by the knowledge that the technology that came for the Tailwind engineers is coming for me, too. Today Claude Code and its peers can make some incredible websites. Another year from now, I suspect they will be making much more.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/01/2026

In which our correspondent braves an AI consciousness conference to meet the people working on model welfare www.platformer.news/ai-consciousnes…

My conversation with the researchers turned to work. One works on model behavior, an area of research focused on shaping AI systems’ personalities. His goal is to give models “aura,” he said.

“Bro, you have aura,” the other researcher told him. “You smell great. What are you wearing?” (It was Louis Vuitton, Ombre Nomade.)

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/01/2026

The author of a viral Reddit thread alleging fraud at a food delivery company tried to back up his claim by sending me AI-generated documents. Today I'm publishing those documents in the hopes that it helps other reporter see what we're up against in the age […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/12/2025

What I got most wrong in my 2025 predictions, plus 11 new predictions for 2026 www.platformer.news/2026-tech-predi…

The bro-ligarchy collapses, as Trump comes to resent being seen as a tool of Silicon Valley. The thing I got the most wrong this year. On one hand, yes, Trump and Musk had their predictable blow-up. Aside from that one relationship, though, the tech right and Trump are still painfully close. Just this month, the Andreessen Horowitz wing of the Republican party pushed through an executive order that seeks to ban states from passing most laws seeking to regulate AI. This is despite the fact that the ban is hugely unpopular with scores of elected Republicans. Perhaps Trump will resent being seen as a tool of Silicon Valley someday, but it did not happen in 2025.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/12/2025

I wrote about the great Reuters investigation into rampant Chinese scams on Meta's platforms and the class-action case that has the company worried www.platformer.news/meta-scams-chin…

Meta will fight this case to the end, because it has too much to lose if the Ninth Circuit's logic holds. But the company's user base has reason to fight, too. Meta has made clear to them that their individual losses are of no real concern to it. The number of scams that it hosts each day shocks the conscience. In far too many cases, when asked to defend its users against scammers, Meta has instead acted as their accomplice.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/12/2025

When OpenAI was founded, it was most afraid of causing catastrophe. Today it seems more afraid that users will churn. I wrote about the company at 10: www.platformer.news/openai-10-norma…

The reason we still call OpenAI and a handful of rivals “labs” is because they were born as research organizations that were indifferent to commercial imperatives and more interested in the sci-fi possibilities, good and bad, that artificial intelligence could make possible. Ten years in, hundreds of millions of people now use tools every day that in 2015 would have qualified as sci-fi. And the company continues to flag new potential dangers along the way (its next models will carry a high risk of enabling cyber attacks, it said on Wednesday.)

Still, in aggregate the company’s actions suggest it has become more worried about user churn than it is most days about catastrophe. One of the best things about OpenAI’s weird era is how weirdly focused it was on preventing harm. Ten years in, though, OpenAI looks increasingly normal. And should the company stay that course, the consequences will be serious — and strange.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/12/2025

Australia's ban on under-16s on social media is well on its way to becoming the global norm. I wrote about how platforms lost the argument www.platformer.news/australia-socia…

On balance, though, it's not at all clear that the median 13-year-old is better off spending several hours a day on Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. Particularly when we know how ruthless these companies are about building features to boost engagement and send children ever further down infinite rabbit holes of content.

To the platforms' chagrin, this line of thinking is rapidly becoming the global conventional wisdom.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/12/2025

When X banned the European Commission's ad account in retaliation for a fine, it demonstrated the exact sort of capricious behavior the DSA is designed to stop www.platformer.news/x-eu-fine-accou…

Bier's chest-thumping rationale for enforcing platform rules collapsed under scrutiny. The idea that X is a platform where all voices are equal is belied by the fact that you can promote your posts ahead of anyone else's by advertising them, just as the commission had, or by becoming a paid subscriber. And the suggestion that the commission was running some sort of scam rested on Bier's vague assertion that it had found an "exploit" by mislabeling one sort of post as another.

More to the point, and to the letter of the DSA law: there was no appeal process, no transparency about how similar cases are handled, and no explanation of why this particular post merited account termination rather than, say, removal of the offending content. (Platforms typically go out of their way to retain advertisers who have done far worse than what the commission is accused of here. How else do you think Meta estimates that it makes $7 billion a year from scam ads?)

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/12/2025

Five years after Meta's Oversight Board its first five cases, it's clear that its ambitions to become Facebook's Supreme Court have failed. I talked to insiders about where it goes next: www.platformer.news/meta-oversight-…

"There was actually a period of time in which Mark thought it was both in his best interest and the right thing to do," said Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John's University, who chronicled the Oversight Board's development, of Zuckerberg's mindset in 2020. But that was also a time when tech companies felt more vulnerable to US regulators, she said — "and part of that was because they couldn't buy the White House."

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/12/2025

A novel new study finds you can reduce polarization on X simply with a simple change to the algorithm. I spoke with the researchers: www.platformer.news/stanford-polari…

The results: reducing exposure to divisive content improved feelings toward the other party by about 2 points on a 100-point scale. On the other hand, boosting that content cooled feelings by about 2.5 points. The researchers say the shift is equivalent to about three years of rising partisan animosity in America, created (or reversed) in just a week.

Remarkably, researchers found this result without adding or removing hyper-partisan material — it simply changed the order in which the posts appear. (For people who saw less polarizing content, for example, it was still in their feeds — just way lower, and thus less likely to be seen.)

“I think the general intuition is that there's a little bit of a failure of imagination going on with a lot of the platforms,” Michael S. Bernstein, a researcher at Stanford and co-author of the paper, told me in an interview. “We think they were sort of painted into a box where they felt like they had to optimize for certain engagement criteria, like that's the only thing they could do. It just felt like that didn't necessarily have to be the case anymore."

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/11/2025

Record labels had the chance to stand up for copyright against AI scrapers — but now they're folding www.platformer.news/suno-warner-set…

The move toward settlements and licensing agreements, distasteful as it no doubt seems to many artists, represents a safer path. And so long as artists can opt out of their work being included, the most obvious direct harm to individuals can be avoided.

Still, you can probably imagine what lesson the tech industry will take from this development. Just as Google learned with books, or YouTube did with Viacom, it rarely pays to ask for permission — and forgiveness often comes more cheaply than you would guess.

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