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Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social
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  1. 1

    My favorite part of Zuckerberg's Joe Rogan interview is when he suggests there is not enough masculine energy at his company, where two out of every three employees is a man.

    50,383 6,627
    Jan 12, 2025
  2. 2

    There were better shows on Netflix when it cost $10 a month

    49,079 2,798
    Jan 21, 2025
  3. 3

    It really is such masculine energy to blame things on a woman who no longer works at the company www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/u...

    Mr. Zuckerberg was amenable. He signaled to Mr. Miller and his colleagues, including other senior Trump advisers, that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would instead focus solely on building tech products. Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for Facebook’s culture, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.
    28,915 5,000
    Jan 16, 2025
  4. 4

    NEW: Meta has quietly dismantled the system that prevented misinformation from spreading in the United States. Machine-learning classifiers that once identified viral hoaxes and limited their reach have now been switched off, Platformer has learned www.platformer.news/meta-ends-mi...

    Behind the scenes, the company was also quietly dismantling a system to prevent the spread of misinformation. When the company announced on Jan. 7 that it would end its fact-checking partnerships, the company also instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation, according to sources and an internal document obtained by Platformer. The result is that the sort of viral hoaxes that ran roughshod over the platform during the 2016 US presidential election — “Pope Francis endorses Trump,” Pizzagate, and all the rest — are now just as eligible for free amplification on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as true stories.
    26,027 9,302
    Jan 15, 2025
  5. 5

    Visiting friends in New York

    Hat with the words “please do not talk to me about AI I will kill myself”
    24,802 2,754
    Mar 12, 2025
  6. 6

    I talked to 10 current and former Meta employees about the company's surrender to the right on speech issues. All were upset. One person called the changes "a precursor to genocide" www.platformer.news/meta-fact-ch...

    But in its panicked retreat from the system it spent years building, Meta may now be putting billions of users at risk. Just because Meta deleted that line about hateful speech causing offline violence doesn't mean it isn't true. And now the company has all but declared open season on immigrants, transgender people and whatever other targets that Trump and his allies find useful in their fascist project. "I can't tell you how much harm comes from non-illegal but harmful content," a longtime former trust and safety employee at the company told me. The classifiers that the company is now switching off meaningfully reduced the spread of hate movements on Meta's platforms, they said. "This is not the climate change debate, or pro-life vs. pro-choice. This is degrading, horrible content that leads to violence and that has the intent to harm other people."
    24,639 6,351
    Jan 8, 2025
  7. 7

    Ladies and gentlemen: we did it

    Techmeme @techmeme.com
    In email to X staff, Musk says "user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we're barely breaking even"; sources: banks plan to sell their debt in X (Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
    24,210 2,659
    Jan 24, 2025
  8. 8

    Taking my Dune worm popcorn bucket into the Wicked screening and telling everyone it’s in the movie

    20,305 768
    Nov 19, 2024
  9. 9

    Some news: amid rapid growth and some over-enforcement of its community guidelines, Bluesky trust and safety chief @aaron.bsky.team tells me the company will quadruple the size of its content moderation team www.platformer.news/bluesky-grow...

    At least one item on his wishlist has been granted: Bluesky has decided to quadruple the size of its contract workforce of content moderators from 25 to 100, the company told Platformer. The move comes in response to Bluesky’s rapid growth since this month’s US presidential election, which triggered a fresh exodus of users away from Elon Musk’s X and over the weekend took the platform past 22 million total users.
    18,439 2,584
    Nov 26, 2024
  10. 10

    Bluesky is truly having an incredible run as Threads' head of product

    Sarah Perez @sarahp.bsky.social
    Meta’s Threads is developing its own take on Bluesky’s ‘Starter Packs’ techcrunch.com/2024/...
    Meta's Threads is developing its own take on Bluesky's 'Starter Packs' | TechCrunch
    Hoping to quell some of the momentum behind social network Bluesky, a competitor to X and Meta's Threads, Meta is developing a feature that takes
    17,998 1,964
    Nov 27, 2024
  11. 11

    NEW: Google used to warn you when you were seeing low-quality search results. Then, in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election, the company quietly turned that warning off www.platformer.news/google-data-...

    The researchers collected their first data in October 2023 and March 2024. Initially, they were struck by how inconsistently Google showed its warnings. A deep learning model they built to analyze the queries suggested that the warnings should have appeared between 29 and 58 times as often as they did in practice. For motivated conspiracy peddlers, they were easy to evade: just adding quotation marks or a single letter to a query was typically enough to make the banner disappear. The researchers were beginning to collect additional data last September when they discovered something unexpected: Google had stopped showing low-quality banners entirely, weeks before early voting began, without disclosing it.
    15,001 4,474
    Feb 25, 2025
  12. 12

    NEW: Platformer has obtained the dehumanizing new guidelines moderating what people can now say about trans people on Facebook and Instagram. Employees tell me these changes are likely to inspire more violence against LGBT people: www.platformer.news/meta-new-tra...

    13,620 4,063
    Jan 10, 2025
  13. 13

    Can Elon Musk do for TikTok what he did for Twitter (kill it)??? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

    Under one scenario that’s been discussed by the Chinese government, Musk’s X — the former Twitter — would take control of TikTok US and run the businesses together, the people said. With more than 170 million users in the US, TikTok could bolster X’s efforts to attract advertisers. Musk also founded a separate artificial intelligence company, xAI, that could benefit from the huge amounts of data generated from TikTok.
    9,699 1,068
    Jan 14, 2025
  14. 14

    Apple Intelligence’s commitment to writing incomprehensible summaries is unparalleled

    “Columbian president condemned something,” notification from X reads
    7,783 568
    Jan 27, 2025
  15. 15

    Saw Wicked last night (it's fantastic) and my main takeaway is that the undergraduates at Shiz University are all 34 years old and do not learn one thing while they are at college

    6,779 145
    Nov 19, 2024
  16. 16

    It’s never too late for your family to accept you for who you are. This Christmas my brother’s homophobic dog stopped barking at me ❤️

    His name is Fig and he is a mutt
    6,548 210
    Dec 25, 2024
  17. 17

    I wrote about Google unveiling its 'responsible AI progress report' by quietly deleting the part of its AI principles where it promised not to work on weapons www.platformer.news/google-ai-pr...

    Google is ready to work on AI weapons now
    The company’s promise to avoid building AI applications that cause harm has been deleted
    5,391 1,551
    Feb 5, 2025
  18. 18

    Great news. Breaking up Google's ad monopoly will be good for journalism, publishers, and the web

    Techmeme @techmeme.com
    A US judge says Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising tech, the second time in a year a court found Google acted illegally (David McCabe/New York Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
    5,073 739
    Apr 17, 2025
  19. 19

    The new chairman of the FTC wants to investigate cENsORsHiP on social platforms and boy do I have a platform for them! www.platformer.news/ftc-censorsh...

    Of course, there actually is one social media platform that has become notorious for removing content based on whims rather than policies. It has banned journalists, blocked links to rival social media and messaging platforms, and suppressed the publication of newsworthy documents related to the 2024 election. Just today, its CEO said he would “fix” the company’s crowdsourced moderation tool after its user base promoted ideas about Ukraine that he personally disagrees with. I believe the law is on this platform’s side: it ought to be able to do all of that, if it wants to. But if Andrew Ferguson is determined to get to the heart of censorship on American social networks, and root out instances of policies that only ever favor one side or another, he can start with Elon Musk’s X. I will not be holding my breath.
    4,923 801
    Feb 21, 2025
  20. 20

    Tough news for Ye but at least he will always be welcome on Substack

    Techmeme @techmeme.com
    Shopify says Ye's store, which began selling swastika shirts before a Super Bowl ad boosted traffic to the site, was shuttered because it violated Shopify's ToS (Patrick Smith/NBC News) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
    4,585 391
    Feb 11, 2025
  21. 21

    Some of these scammers aren’t even trying anymore

    Spam text reading “how are is life”
    4,350 191
    May 3, 2025
  22. 22

    Was the "error" disabling the company's automated content moderation systems last month?

    Techmeme @techmeme.com
    Meta apologizes and says it had fixed an "error" that resulted in some Instagram users seeing violent and graphic content in their Reels recommendations (Dylan Butts/CNBC) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
    2,854 277
    Feb 27, 2025
  23. 23

    I love her music ❤️

    2,832 131
    Apr 5, 2025
  24. 24

    Me trying to entertain myself while Spotify is down

    A one man band busking on a street
    2,787 142
    Apr 16, 2025
  25. 25

    I'm glad to see this pressure on Google and Apple. If any other company was running an active CSAM generator in public you better believe it would have been removed from their app stores by now www.wired.com/story/x-grok...

    Why Are Grok and X Still Available in App Stores?
    Elon Musk’s chatbot has been used to generate thousands of sexualized images of adults and apparent minors. Apple and Google have removed other “nudify” apps—but continue to host X and Grok.
    2,736 825
    Jan 8, 2026