When social justice protests swept the country in 2020, tech companies mostly welcomed employee activism. The Gaza demonstrations are getting a much different reception | Continue reading
With AI search results coming to the masses, the human-powered web recedes further into the background | Continue reading
OpenAI’s forthcoming voice assistant laughs, flirts, helps — and draws a sharp distinction with Google | Continue reading
As Stack Overflow, Reddit, and others license their users’ posts to train AI, the internet’s extraction phase is accelerating | Continue reading
The company has new strategies for shoring up our shared sense of reality. Will they matter in the election? | Continue reading
From chatbots to clinical trials, digital twins are suggesting at least one good answer to the question of what generative AI is for | Continue reading
After the Supreme Court declined to issue a stay this week, 20 years of court rulings may be about to go out the window | Continue reading
Is it smarter to take the deal they can get — or fight it out in court? | Continue reading
To grow again, it will have to deliver on its mission | Continue reading
How it happened, ByteDance’s response, and what happens next | Continue reading
The First Amendment is a major obstacle, scholars say — but it isn’t insurmountable | Continue reading
With the Senate counting down to a critical vote on the platform’s future, its problems are multiplying | Continue reading
Five ways of thinking about Llama 3, its latest large language model | Continue reading
Plus: Musk backs down in Brazil | Continue reading
The tech industry's overpromising about generative AI is starting to catch up with it | Continue reading
Jonathan Haidt wrote a best-selling book about teens and social media. Not everyone buys its thesis | Continue reading
Founder Eugen Rochko on helping Threads federate, dodging venture capital, and why he hopes Bluesky abandons its protocol | Continue reading
Casey Newton on the challenging environment it faced, from the ad market to personalized algorithmic recommendations # | Continue reading
every newsletter I love, from Garbage Day and Today In Tabs to Citation Needed and Ironic Sans, are moving off the Nazi-friendly platform # | Continue reading
essential reading for anyone interested in journalism # | Continue reading
"Lawmakers are quickly advancing an anti-sex, anti-speech agenda in which every adult user of the internet could soon find themself entangled." # | Continue reading
Seven principles for journalism in the age of AI Be rigorous with your definitions. Predict less, explain more. Don’t hype things up. Focus on the people building AI systems — and the people affected by its release. Offer strategic takes on products. Emphasize the tradeo … | Continue reading
Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization as part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company, Platformer has learned. The move leaves Microsoft without a dedicated team to ensure its AI principle … | Continue reading
Twitter's decline is paving the way for other platforms to build next-generation replacements. And now the biggest player in the game is getting involved: Meta is in the early stages of building a dedicated app for people to post text-based updates.(platformer.news) | Continue reading
Twitter's website is breaking in novel new ways - and while the company managed to recover from its latest outage within a couple hours, the story behind how it broke suggests there are likely to be similar problems in the near future. On Monday morning, Twitter users logged on t … | Continue reading
After his Super Bowl tweet did worse numbers than President Biden’s, Twitter’s CEO ordered major changes to the algorithm | Continue reading
For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience.(platformer.news) | Continue reading
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are back. The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter.(platformer.news) | Continue reading
The project was part of Elon Musk's attempt to rid Twitter of spam. But rather than work to remove individual offenders, the company identified mobile networks associated with large spam networks in specific countries, and blocked users who relied on those networks from receiving … | Continue reading
A month ago, when Elon Musk's Twitter first set out to revamp the Twitter Blue subscription, workers at the company identified a problem. Musk had promised that subscribers to the $8-a-month service would see half as many ads as free users.(platformer.news) | Continue reading
After a long weekend away, today let's talk about the largely positive reception that Elon Musk's radical remaking of Twitter is getting from tech CEOs - and whether those views are likely to change if the fight that Musk is picking with Apple erodes even more value from his $44 … | Continue reading
On Thursday evening, after a full day of chaos on the timeline, Elon Musk's Twitter halted new enrollment into its $8-a-month Blue subscription offering. Offering anyone the chance to slap a "verified" badge on their account had led to widespread impersonation of government offic … | Continue reading
Platformer reports on Elon Musk's ongoing self-inflicted train wreck # | Continue reading
Will he go through with it? PLUS: Botched layoffs, how the new Blue could lose money, and more | Continue reading
The email went out at 5:21 PT PT on Thursday. For a full week, Twitter employees had waited in hopes of hearing something directly from their new owner. Instead, they had heard only from Elon Musk's intermediaries, and even then usually not directly.(platformer.news) | Continue reading
Twitter is strongly considering making its users pay to remain verified on the service, Platformer has learned. If the project makes forward, users would have to subscribe to Twitter Blue at $4.99 a month or lose their badges.(platformer.news) | Continue reading
Twitter has a new CEO. And he'd like to see your code, please | Continue reading
Ben Chestnut stepped down in August after arguing that asking for pronouns at the start of meetings “does more harm than good” | Continue reading
Reporter Jahnavi Sen met with the source, who sought to verify their identity by providing Sen with documents including their work badge and pay slips. Many conversations followed, Sen told Platformer in an interview, and by the fall The Wire trusted the source enough to turn to … | Continue reading
Say goodbye to the full-screen feed, and at least some of those recommendations — for now. Adam Mosseri explains why | Continue reading
A new FTC lawsuit hits on the day of its first-ever earnings decline | Continue reading
How do you protect user privacy in a country with no privacy standards? | Continue reading
CEO Parag Agrawal on five years of regrets | Continue reading
Normally when you buy a company, you talk it up. You talk about its strengths, about its potential, about its glorious future under your leadership. Normally you do not buy a company to re-litigate its past. But Elon Musk is no normal acquirer, and neither is his behavior in the … | Continue reading
Today, let's talk about the lunacy of Facebook running a secret campaign against TikTok focused on the dangers of social networks to children. The campaign, which is sadly consistent with the company's approach to competition over the past 10-plus years, saw it paying Republican … | Continue reading
Tokens like the new one from Bored Ape Yacht Club promise to decentralize the web. So why are insiders reaping most of the profits? | Continue reading
CrowdTangle co-founder Brandon Silverman on social networks' responsibility to open up | Continue reading
How much will it matter? Notes on the platforms in wartime | Continue reading