Casey Newton
LightNews LightNews
banner
caseynewton.bsky.social
Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social
220K followers 530 following 2.1K posts
Email salesman at Platformer.news and podcast co-host at Hard Fork.
Posts Replies Media Videos
caseynewton.bsky.social
I wrote about Europe maybe retreating from strong privacy protections in the name of AI competitiveness and why it may be making a mistake www.platformer.news/eu-ai-act-ch...
It would be one thing if onerous AI regulations were preventing EU citizens from getting lifesaving medical care or high-performing AI coworkers. For the moment, though, Europe is getting just about everything Americans are — a few weeks to a few months later. (And for everything else, there are VPNs.)
November 11, 2025 at 1:33 AM
Reposted by Casey Newton
sarahjeong.bsky.social
one time I pointed out that elon musk followed no women on twitter and he immediately followed caity weaver
November 10, 2025 at 8:24 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Wrote about the great @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social investigation into scams on Meta's platforms and why lately nothing seems to stick to the company www.platformer.news/meta-scams-p...
Meta has a scam problem
The company's own projections showed up to 10 percent of its revenue could come from scams, according to a new leak. PLUS: OpenAI's "backstop" controversy
www.platformer.news
November 7, 2025 at 2:06 AM
Reposted by Casey Newton
jeffhorwitz.bsky.social
Meta earns $3.5 billion every six months from showing Faceboon and Instagram users 15 billion “higher legal risk” scam ad impressions a day, internal documents state.

That haul vastly exceeds how much the company expects regulators
To fine it for running scam ads.

www.reuters.com/investigatio...
www.reuters.com
November 6, 2025 at 11:46 AM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Wow. This is the first reported case of Perplexity ever paying anyone
techmeme.com Techmeme @techmeme.com · 5d
Snap announces a deal to distribute Perplexity's search engine to Snapchat users; Perplexity will pay Snap $400M through a combination of cash and equity (Bloomberg)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
November 5, 2025 at 10:11 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Wrote about Perplexity's comical flouting of every other website's rules and insistence that it is being "bullied" www.platformer.news/amazon-perpl...
Amazon will be fine regardless of how this particular conflict plays out. But I’m curious how much longer Perplexity will be able to keep up its act. The company loves to present itself as an underdog. But you can only slap so many people in the face before they start asking if the real bully here might be the one doing all the slapping.
November 5, 2025 at 2:12 AM
Reposted by Casey Newton
eliyudin.com
can’t tell if my antidepressants aren’t working or if they just weren’t built for this. like, zoloft was introduced in the 90s it barely needed to work then. if you got sad you could just buy a house.
November 3, 2025 at 11:50 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
I wrote about Bluesky a year after the big post-election surge in users, and whether you can build a happier version of Twitter while keeping its same basic shape www.platformer.news/bluesky-2025...
t's clear that you can build a nicer online environment than X has; in many ways Bluesky already did. What's less clear is that you can build a Twitter clone that mostly makes people feel good. For as vital and hilarious as Twitter often was, it also accelerated the polarization of our politics and often left users feeling worse than they did before they opened it. Bluesky's ingenuity in reimagining feeds and moderation tools has been a boon to social networks, which have happily adopted some of its best ideas. (You can now find "starter packs" on both Threads and Mastodon.) Ultimately, though, it has the same shape and fundamental dynamics as a place that even its most active users called "the Hellsite."
November 4, 2025 at 1:53 AM
caseynewton.bsky.social
I'm doing a big Bluesky column today! Hit me with your where-Bluesky-is-at-this-moment-in-2025 takes
November 3, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Reposted by Casey Newton
pfrazee.com
Sharing some personal thoughts and feelings about the last weekend on the world's number one baseball app
100% cooked
Some reflections on the product design discussions from the last weekend
pfrazee.leaflet.pub
November 3, 2025 at 7:30 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
(podcaster wedding vows) OK so first let's talk about how we got here
November 1, 2025 at 4:36 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Bluesky is now testing dislikes. If you see a post you dislike you're in the beta techcrunch.com/2025/10/31/b...
Bluesky hits 40 million users, introduces 'dislikes' beta | TechCrunch
Bluesky is looking to a new signal — "dislikes" — to personalize users' feeds.
techcrunch.com
October 31, 2025 at 8:47 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Character.AI is the first major company to acknowledge that companions aren't safe for young people. Will others follow? www.platformer.news/character-ai...
Maybe Character.AI banned teens from using its companions simply because executives believed it is the right thing to do. Or maybe they became convinced that the company’s mounting legal liability had forced their hand. Whatever the case, in a benighted year for trust and safety, it’s at least somewhat heartening to see a company shrink itself in the name of protecting its users. At a time when AI is presented as an inevitability, Character.AI’s retreat offers a timely reminder that human beings are still in control. You don’t have to build it; you don’t have to release it; and you can still pull the plug. Here’s hoping other companies heed its example.
October 31, 2025 at 12:04 AM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Bending Spoons buys dying tech brands and jacks up their prices to maximize pain for their remaining customers. It is the final stage of enshittification before death
techmeme.com Techmeme @techmeme.com · 11d
Milan-based Bending Spoons, which buys and seeks to revitalize tech brands like AOL, raised $710M led by T. Rowe Price at an $11B pre-money valuation (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
October 30, 2025 at 2:47 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Watched the new Stranger Things trailer and all the kids are in their 40s now
October 30, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Reposted by Casey Newton
famousceleb.co
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works and let me know if you have any questions! 🤗
October 29, 2025 at 9:16 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Wrote about OpenAI's restructuring and what it means for how AI is governed www.platformer.news/openai-restr...
The optimistic view of these changes is that pushback from activists and regulators resulted in a meaningful oversight mechanism being preserved within the nonprofit that runs OpenAI. The pessimistic view is that while the mechanism exists on paper, recent history suggests that this particular board takes a fairly hands-off approach to corporate governance. In one sense, yes, the nonprofit still runs the for-profit. But the board is stocked with entrepreneurs, including Altman and at least two people (Taylor and Adam D’Angelo) who run businesses that are customers of OpenAI. Is the nonprofit truly running the for-profit — or is it the other way around?
October 29, 2025 at 12:05 AM
caseynewton.bsky.social
I talked to OpenAI about its surprising new research on the prevalence of mental health concerns in ChatGPT usage and whether this is a problem we can model-tweak our way out of www.platformer.news/openai-menta...
Tweaking a model’s output may well reduce self-harm and delusions in a chatbot’s users. But whatever changes OpenAI or other companies make, they will also simultaneously be working to build products that users increasingly feel like they can’t live without. Even as it works to reduce emotional dependence on ChatGPT for some subset of distressed users, OpenAI will be working to increase users’ overall dependence on its products for work, entertainment, web browsing and more. And it will do so in part by reliably telling us what we want to hear. It would be great if AI companies continue to see emotional dependence on their products as a problem to be solved. But it seems likely that, at least to some of them, it will eventually be evidence that the product is working as intended.
October 28, 2025 at 12:09 AM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Tommy Craggs is a treasure www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-...
Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI
He’s one of the loudest voices of the AI haters—even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention.
www.wired.com
October 27, 2025 at 9:08 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Really the most Meta-like tactic on display from OAI lately is to release products that have obvious harms and say "oops!" two days later and add some minor safeguard
techmeme.com Techmeme @techmeme.com · 17d
With an influx of Meta alums, some OpenAI staffers worry it is adopting Meta's tactics, like using social media dynamics with Sora and a softening stance on ads (The Information)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
October 24, 2025 at 7:53 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
The bar for earning a free Waymo ride just keeps getting higher
October 23, 2025 at 6:24 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Despite being one of the only places adult creators can sell their work, OnlyFans' take rate is much lower than YouTube, Substack, or the App Store.
techmeme.com Techmeme @techmeme.com · 20d
OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair says the platform has paid out $25B to creators since its founding in 2016; OnlyFans takes a 20% fee on subscriptions and content sales (Rose Henderson/Bloomberg)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
October 21, 2025 at 4:12 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Based on a post in their Discord, looks like OpenAI is announcing their browser at 10AM.
October 21, 2025 at 3:16 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
OpenAI's flailing over content policy for Sora is just the latest example of the company rushing out a product at the expense of its own reputation. As AI tools get more powerful, that's reason for concern www.platformer.news/openai-sora-...
It’s just as clear that this approach has long stopped serving the company well. From the Scarlett Johansson voice mode controversy to GPT-4o sycophancy to the more recent backlash against GPT-5, OpenAI’s rushed release schedule now routinely puts the company on the defensive. But with Altman now openly acknowledging the connection between revenue pressures and product releases, there is every reason to believe that policy concerns will continue to be eclipsed by the urgency of shipping.
October 21, 2025 at 12:16 AM