Casey Newton

What I'm referring to. It's a privilege to be invited onto networks to talk about my reporting but I have limits. Similarly stopped doing NewsNation after Nextar took its Kimmel stance.

Wait … there are real LinkedIn accounts??

It makes OpenAI employees nervous. One of the more surprising reactions to the launch came from OpenAI's own employees, several of whom arched an eyebrow about the company's latest product. "AI-based feeds are scary," posted John Hallman, who works on pretraining at the company. "I won't deny that I felt some concern when I first learned we were releasing Sora 2. That said, I think the team did the absolute best job they possible could in designing a positive experience." (Here's a funny response to that one.) "I share a similar mix of worry and excitement," responded Boaz Barak, a member of OpenAI's technical staff. "Sora 2 is technically amazing but it’s premature to congratulate ourselves on avoiding the pitfalls of other social media apps and deepfakes."

Here's what everyone is saying about Sora. Of note: several OpenAI employees have posted about their concerns with the product www.platformer.news/sora-2-react...

In the future, iPhone reviews should default to comparing the phone to the model from two years ago ... almost no one I know is upgrading every year any more

Asking the Comet browser to summarize Emperor Cleon's huge naturals

And what if it is the answer? What if perfectly personalized entertainment takes over our screens and our socializing? The arrival of Sora has made those questions feel suddenly more urgent. This is the first social network that — on launch day — said it will disable infinite scroll for teens, and nudge adults to put their phones down when they've been browsing for too long. It's a responsible step for OpenAI to take. But it might better be viewed as a warning.

Tried out the new slop app www.platformer.news/sora-2-hands...

You can appreciate the new choices that OpenAI is giving parents here while also noting that parental controls also push at least some of the responsibility for ChatGPT safety onto those same parents — while also requiring those same parents to create ChatGPT accounts of their own. In that, OpenAI joins Meta, Snap, TikTok, and other apps popular with teenagers that all but require parents to take on a part-time job learning and managing the settings of apps that change continuously and introduce new risks as they do. At the same time, this is a feature that could absolutely save lives. It’s also a feature that no other chatbot maker has yet introduced, despite high-profile cases of harm on their platforms.

Talked to OpenAI about its new parental controls and the effort to make ChatGPT safer for kids — by pushing more responsibility onto parents www.platformer.news/chatgpt-pare...

It’s both depressing and darkly hilarious how Lawfare posting has gone from “we got him on an Article 33, Clause 8, Subsection Alpha infraction, baby cannon time!” to *slams whisky bottle down* “the law is fake and I challenge John Roberts to a fistfight at the Walmart parking lot.”

OpenAI says it wants ChatGPT to be helpful rather than addictive, and that’s the way I experience it today. But a feature like Pulse, which looks and feels like a social feed, could create other incentives. (Particularly given that the company is reportedly now also looking for an ads chief, as Alex Heath reported in his new newsletter Sources this week.) Notably, many OpenAI executives and product leaders came from Meta, including new CEO of applications Fidji Simo. Over time, Facebook’s growth imperatives led it to greatly expand the reasons why it would send you a push notification, until eventually they had no real connection to the user at all. (Today Facebook notified me that someone had listed a 1987 Dodge Ram on Marketplace, a feature that I have never once used.)

ChatGPT Pulse is a step toward becoming a proactive assistant that works for you in the background. It's also one more feed to scroll. Sound familiar? www.platformer.news/chatgpt-puls...

What a weird-ass Rapture. Only the Constitution disappeared.

Justice Dept. Official Pushes Prosecutors to Investigate George Soros’s Foundation

This is, without any exaggeration, exactly how Putin and Orbán proceeded — using antisemitism to discredit the idea of civil society and political opposition, and as an excuse to undo the rule of law.
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/u...

thank you Mike!!

thank you James!!

thank you Reece!

Three, we’re going to create an audio feed. For years now, readers have asked me to narrate each edition so you can listen to it as a podcast. (As pioneered by Ben Thompson’s great Stratechery.) I’ve resisted until now because I worried the added work would burn me out. (Candidly, I still do.) But the success of Hard Fork — one of the 100 best podcasts of all time, by the way! — has introduced our work to a lot of people who would rather listen to me than to read. I’m still in the early stages of planning this, and I expect to encounter many technical challenges along the way. But my hope is that a year from now you’ll get regular audio drops from Platformer that make your subscription feel valuable.

Today is Platformer's fifth birthday! I wrote about the state of the newsletter economy, how the business is going, and what we're planning for year six www.platformer.news/platformer-y...

Exclusive | U.S. Government Is Expected to Get Multibillion-Dollar Fee in TikTok Deal The fee would be the latest example of the government getting paid for involvement in private-sector deals.

It's impossible to overstate how problematic it is for the White House to demand payouts or company stakes in the course of approving deals, hand-selecting acquirers, demanding corporate compliance or anything else.

Everything that's weird about the deal to spin out TikTok PLUS: What LLMs say when they think no one’s looking, and Trump’s visa chaos

I tried to capture everything that's strange about the TikTok deal. A giveaway to Trump's allies and another step toward US media being controlled by his allies www.platformer.news/tiktok-deal-...

TikTok is tagging videos from Gaza with TikTok Shop products TikTok’s new AI feature automatically looks for products in your videos.

Lotta bleak stuff out there today but not sure anything can top 'you can now shop the war in Gaza on TikTok' www.theverge.com/tech/782540/...

YES

Every journalist, pundit, and entertainer in the country that doesn't want to bend the knee to Trump needs to figure out a way off corporate platforms ASAP
www.garbageday.email/p/petty-powe...

Omg

X remains the platform of choice for most politicos, and continues to play an outsize role in shaping elite perception of our politics. The dark picture of America that takes root there spreads to TikTok, Instagram, and cable news, continuously warping Americans' perceptions of one another. The vast majority of Americans continue to reject political violence. Civil war is for idiots and losers. But in the dark mirror of social media, we are only ever on the brink of all-out conflict. And the longer we stare at it, the more we risk that fiction turning into reality.

I wrote about how social media enabled Charlie Kirk while making our politics ever worse. www.platformer.news/thursday-new...

may I speak with the primary poster in your household?

Porn sites offer a relevant point of comparison. After the United Kingdom started to require adult sites to confirm users’ ages this summer, traffic to those sites plummeted. At the same time, sites that flouted the law thrived. Pornhub, for example, saw traffic drop 47 percent in the first two weeks after age-gating was introduced, according to the Guardian. AI models are becoming smaller and more capable all the time; you can already run very good ones on a modern laptop. It seems entirely possible that teens who are savvy to OpenAI’s alert system simply take their sensitive questions elsewhere.

ChatGPT will soon alert parents when their children express thoughts of self-harm. Will that protect them — or simply drive them elsewhere? www.platformer.news/openai-teen-...

I’m launching Sources, a new publication about the tech industry’s inside conversation, and Access, a tech interview podcast with my friend @hamburger.bsky.social.

The first issue of Sources drops tomorrow, featuring an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, which airs in full on Access this Thursday.

Trump Extends Deadline to Secure TikTok Deal Until December 16 President Donald Trump again extended the deadline for TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd. to divest the platform’s US operations — this time until Dec. 16 — staving off a nationwide shutdown of th...

What a joke www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Congress also worried — perhaps unconstitutionally — that the Chinese government would pressure ByteDance to manipulate its recommendation algorithms to sow division in the United States. (Among other things, members of Congress complained that the app seemed too pro-Palestinian.) Well, now we know what the deal will do to address the threat of ByteDance manipulating the content in Americans' TikTok feeds: nothing. The spun-out company will simply license the recommendations from its parent company, and that will be that.

After all that hand-wringing about the dangerous Chinese TikTok algorithm, it appears that Trump is going to let the new American TikTok just license it from China. Whatever!! www.platformer.news/tiktok-deal-...

iOS 26 is out now and I recommend updating immediately. If it bricks your device you don't have to work today

Just to be blunt, if you want Wired and 404 and The Verge to employ reporters who understand the memes on bullet casings and can connect them to gaming culture while having the legal and support resources to deal with waves of harassment when we do it… you have to subscribe and pay for the work

Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency Techmeme turns 20 freaking years old today. This is our self-congratulatory post marking the occasion. Please share, retweet, and offer your sincerest congratulations. And thanks to so many of you for reading us all these years.

Happy 20th birthday to the indispensable @techmeme.com! @gaberivera.bsky.social only writes about once every 10 years, so I pay close attention when he does. Great discussion of the current state of tech media news.techmeme.com/250912/20-ye...