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Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social
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  1. 1

    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.
    26,020 9,300
    Jan 15, 2025
  2. 2

    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.

    50,369 6,626
    Jan 12, 2025
  3. 3

    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."
    24,634 6,349
    Jan 8, 2025
  4. 4

    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.
    28,910 5,000
    Jan 16, 2025
  5. 5

    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.
    15,000 4,474
    Feb 25, 2025
  6. 6

    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...

    13,616 4,063
    Jan 10, 2025
  7. 7

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

    49,058 2,797
    Jan 21, 2025
  8. 8

    Visiting friends in New York

    Hat with the words “please do not talk to me about AI I will kill myself”
    24,790 2,751
    Mar 12, 2025
  9. 9

    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
    24,198 2,657
    Jan 24, 2025
  10. 10

    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.
    18,431 2,583
    Nov 26, 2024
  11. 11

    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
    17,995 1,964
    Nov 27, 2024
  12. 12

    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
    5,395 1,552
    Feb 5, 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

    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
  15. 15

    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
  16. 16

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

    20,299 767
    Nov 19, 2024
  17. 17

    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
    5,071 739
    Apr 17, 2025
  18. 18

    NEW: AI bots caused Wikipedia's bandwidth costs to increase by 50 percent last year, and are still growing exponentially. I wrote about its plan to fight back — and whether it will be enough. www.platformer.news/wikipedia-ai...

    At the same time, the organization disclosed today in a new blog post, the situation is becoming untenable: AI-driven requests for Wikipedia content are growing exponentially, at significant cost to the foundation, and are not being paid by the companies responsible. Those companies are also serving information from Wikipedia without attribution, greatly reducing the chances that their users will visit Wikipedia and contribute or donate to it. Moreover, during surges of interest in the site — after the death of a celebrity, for example, or in the wake of a natural disaster — bot traffic to other pages is now so significant that it is causing slower page loading times for human users.
    2,441 607
    Apr 2, 2025
  19. 19

    "In the new ... internet, girls can’t learn about periods on Reddit and artists can’t sell smutty games on Itch.io, but a military contractor will make you nonconsensual deepfakes of Taylor Swift taking her top off for $30 a month." — @thedextriarchy.bsky.social www.theverge.com/internet-cen...

    Sex is getting scrubbed from the internet, but a billionaire can sell you AI nudes
    Grok’s nonconsensual deepfakes show how hollow the online safety push can be.
    1,203 594
    Aug 10, 2025
  20. 20

    A year ago today, Trump threatened to jail Zuckerberg for the rest of his life. Today, Trump is helping Meta win regulatory battles around the world.

    I wrote about everything that Zuckerberg has gotten from Trump 2.0 so far: www.platformer.news/trump-zucker...

    February Trump issued a memo threatening to retaliate against countries that impose digital service taxes or heavy fines on "cutting-edge American technology companies." "American businesses will no longer prop up failed foreign economies through extortive fines and taxes," he wrote. The memo had its intended effect. India dropped its tax on digital ads in March. New Zealand dropped its digital services tax in May. Canada, which had imposed a 3 percent tax on Meta and other tech giants, rescinded its tax in June as part of trade negotiations with the United States. Italy may follow.
    1,711 585
    Aug 29, 2025
  21. 21

    Apple Intelligence’s commitment to writing incomprehensible summaries is unparalleled

    “Columbian president condemned something,” notification from X reads
    7,781 568
    Jan 27, 2025
  22. 22

    NEWS: After sustained attacks from House Republicans, the Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled. A huge blow to academic freedom and our ability to understand platforms and influence operations www.platformer.news/stanford-int...

    After five years of pioneering research into the abuse of social platforms, the Stanford Internet Observatory is winding down. Its founding director, Alex Stamos, left his position in November. Renee DiResta, its research director, left last week after her contract was not renewed. One other staff member's contract expired this month, while others have been told to look for jobs elsewhere, sources say. Some members of the eight-person team might find other jobs at Stanford, and it’s possible that the university will retain the Stanford Internet Observatory branding, according to sources familiar with the matter. But the lab will not conduct research into the 2024 election or other elections in the future.
    952 529
    Jun 13, 2024
  23. 23

    Regarding the liberal fantasy of saving X by posting on it more — @pbump.com has it exactly right www.pbump.net/o/the-power-...

    Nor was it compelling. The central argument was that Twitter — which is no longer the Twitter of five or ten years ago both literally and figuratively — is an important element of the national conversation and that leaving it to the fringe-right and to trolls was ceding important terrain. But this idea that others could swoop in and collectively shift the conversation, beyond imposing an odd job requirement on all of us, misunderstands the nature of the change from Twitter to X. It is owned and directed by a far-right actor who bought it specifically to elevate and amplify right-wing messaging. You might as well argue that people should join the Republican Party in order to redirect it to less extreme terrain; that ship sailed a long time ago and you’re going to encounter some systemic obstacles that are beyond your persuasive powers.
    2,034 474
    Aug 25, 2025
  24. 24

    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 of AI www.platformer.news/fake-uber-ea...

    The whistleblower, for his part, worked to amp up the pressure. He told me he had shared the document with other reporters, putting me into a competitive crunch. He asked when I thought I would publish. I asked him if he could point me to any current or former coworkers of his who could help me understand the document better. “Not really,” he said. By this point, alarm bells were starting to ring. I wondered if the employee badge the whistleblower had shared with me might have been AI-generated. While AI systems are notoriously unreliable at identifying their own outputs, Google Gemini can detect SynthID watermarks embedded in images that it produces. I uploaded the badge to Gemini and asked if Gemini had made it. “Most or all of this image was edited or generated with Google AI,” it said.
    1,245 466
    Jan 6, 2026
  25. 25

    NEW: Meta just killed its diversity, equity and inclusion program. Employees aren't buying the company's argument that it's the result of a 'shifting legal landscape.' What they're saying inside the company ➡️ www.platformer.news/meta-kills-d...

    Another employee noted in an internal post how reactive the company had become, dramatically changing policies and positions based on one relatively close election. "It's a bit crazy, just thinking that if the election result was different — none of this would happen? Does it mean we were doing things that we did not believe in? Are we going to have such big changes every time power shifts?" Responded another employee: "Apparently the current direction of the wind is the way we 'lean in.'"
    2,605 459
    Jan 10, 2025