For all followers today:
- Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first
- After his Super Bowl tweet did worse numbers than President Biden’s, Twitter’s CEO ordered major changes to the algorithm
- Happy Valentine’s Day
For all followers today:
- Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view counts
- Insider Twitter 2.0, turmoil has employees stretched to the max
- Good tweet about cellos
For all followers today:
- Musk discusses putting all of Twitter behind a paywall
- Will he go through with it?
- PLUS: Botched layoffs, how the new Blue could lose money, and more
For all followers today:
- How trust and safety warned Musk about the Blue verification disaster before it shipped
- A new wave of contractor layoffs stuns the company
- Twitter’s ad team worries about a sharp decline in sales
For subscribers today:
- Elon's first big move: pay to remain verified on Twitter
- Under pressure to generate revenue quickly, Twitter's new CEO considers ending free verification
- Good Halloween costume
For subscribers today:
- Another whistleblower comes for Twitter
- Is the real threat the company's "God Mode" — or its trust and safety team?
- Good tweet about view counts
Early edition for all followers today:
- 🚨 Instagram walks back its changes
- Say goodbye to the full-screen feed, and at least some of those recommendations — for now. Adam Mosseri explains why
- Good tweet about red flags
In the FIRST edition of
@Platformer
:
- Hi
- Thank you
- A fascinating new study on the origins of disinformation and why Trump is a problem platforms can't solve
For all followers today:
- Meta confirms that it’s a building a decentralized, text-based social network
- Instagram chief Adam Mosseri is leading the project
- Is this the Twitter replacement we've been waiting for?
For all followers today:
- New cracks emerge in Elon Musk's Twitter
- Jira went down, Slack's gone, and site performance is degraded. What's next?
- Good tweet about crimes
For all followers today:
- What really happened at Basecamp
- How a list of “funny” customer names triggered an internal reckoning
- Good tweet about meat coffee
For subscribers today:
- Elon goes hardcore
- Musk’s top 5 product priorities, including Blue for businesses and encrypted DMs
- Good tweet about traffic court
For all followers today:
- Why some tech CEOs are rooting for Musk
- They're skeptical of their workers, too.
- PLUS: As many as 62,000 banned accounts might be restored to Twitter in the coming ‘Big Bang,’ employees tell us
For all followers today:
- Is the music industry's future on the blockchain?
- Royal's
@3LAU
and Paradigm's
@FEhrsam
on how selling royalties directly to fans could end predatory record deals
- A good Nativity scene
For all followers today:
- It's time to change how we cover Elon Musk
- After a weekend of whoppers about X and fighting Mark Zuckerberg, the press should take a more skeptical approach
- Good tweet about dodgeball
For all followers today:
- How the Kids Online Safety Act puts us all at risk
- Anti-speech laws are spreading from states to Congress, and the future of online speech could hang in the balance
- Good tweet about superconductors
For subscribers today:
- Elon's paranoid purge
- Q&A with Twitter engineer Eric Frohnhoefer, fired for correcting Elon Musk
- Good tweet about YouTube fireplace videos
For all followers today:
- Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams
- As the company accelerates its push into AI products, the ethics and society team is gone
- Good SVB tweets
For all followers today:
- Why the company behind Pokémon Go is getting crypto-curious
- Niantic is exploring web3. Will its user base play along?
- Good tweet about Zoom
For all followers today:
- Why journalists can't quit Twitter
- The media should be building alternatives. Instead, some are doubling down
- Good tweet about Ratatouille
For subscribers today:
- Twitter’s advertising losses are piling up
- Revenues are in free fall, employees say. Can Musk turn the tide?
- A good life hack
For all followers today:
- Can platforms outsmart Texas's social media law?
- Announcing Platformer's new managing editor,
@ZoeSchiffer
- Good tweet about March 1st
For all followers today:
- How TikTok failed to make the case for itself
- After a rocky appearance before Congress, the company has reason to reflect
- Good tweet about milk
For all followers today:
- Trump is restored to Twitter
- Layoffs continue, chaos on the sales team, and what happens when the certs expire?
- Good tweet about a camel
In today’s special edition, free to all:
- The battle inside Signal
- New features like usernames and crypto payments could open avenues for abuse, employees say
- WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton is now heavily involved and writing code
- Some good tweets
For subscribers today:
- Twitter’s badge of dishonor
- The weekend's verification bonfire is an all-time case study in doing trust and safety wrong
- Good tweet about Snapchat’s AI
For all followers today:
- Extremely Hardcore: Our New York magazine cover story
- Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the platform against impulsive ranting billionaires — then one made himself the CEO
- Good tweet about Glassdoor
For all followers today:
- Reddit goes dark
- As it moves to shut down third-party apps, the site’s self-governing ethos comes back to haunt it
- A good Reddit post
For subscribers today:
- In latest round of Twitter cuts, some see hints of its next CEO
- Is the job Steve Davis' to lose?
- PLUS: A smart new tool to fight child exploitation online
For all followers today:
- An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, reviewed
- Three ways of looking at a Facebook scandal
- Good tweet about the Overton window
For subscribers today:
- The secret list of Twitter VIPs getting boosted over everyone else
- Congratulations to Ben Shapiro, AOC, and ... LeBron?
- Good tweet about NextDoor
For all followers today:
- The surgeon general's warning is a wake-up call for social networks
- A growing body of evidence suggests that social products pose significant risks to teenagers
- Good tweet about Google
For all followers today:
- How Facebook does (and doesn’t) shape our political views
- Four long-awaited studies paint a muddy picture of social media’s impact on public opinion
- Good tweet about innovation
Bonus edition for subscribers today:
- Twitter stiffs Google
- Musk won't pay his Google Cloud bill — and the company's trust and safety systems are hanging in the balance
- Good tweet about Call of Duty
For subscribers today:
- Inside Twitter's failed Space launch
- How a decimated team and shrinking server capacity rained on Ron DeSantis' parade
- Good tweet about Tesla
For subscribers today:
- YouTube opens its doors to deepfakes
- Newer AI companies are heavily restricting the use of their tools. Social networks are taking a different approach
- Good post about a cowboy
For subscribers today:
- Inside Twitter’s product roadmap under Musk
- A new Vine camera is in. Notes and Revue are out
- Good tweet about a new social network
For all followers today:
- Nick Clegg tries to reset the conversation
- Facebook's VP of global affairs talks to us about algorithms, polarization, and the Trump decision
- Good tweet about online dating
For subscribers today:
- Twitter's regime change
- The old guard is gone. The new one is negotiating prices with Stephen King
- Some news about the edit button
For all followers today:
- Elon Musk's creep show
- Caught in a series of lies about his willingness to fight Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire's disturbing spiral accelerates
- Good post about lambs
For all followers today:
- How Twitter got research right
- While other tech giants hide from their internal researchers, Twitter is doing its failing — and fixing — in public
- Good tweet about bowling alleys
For all followers today:
- Winners and losers in the race to add AI
- ChatGPT is now running inside Snapchat, Notion, and other apps. Will it give them a sustaining advantage — or just line OpenAI's pockets?
- Good tweet about Subway
For subscribers today:
- So much for Elon Musk’s everything app
- Suspending emergency accounts, enabling anti-trans speech, and other stops Twitter is making in its pursuit of X
- Good tweet about AI
For subscribers today:
- The secret history of encrypted DMs on Twitter
- They almost launched in 2018 — and could still do a lot of good today
- Good tweet about 1994
For all subscribers today:
- Facebook and Twitter respond quickly to a flood of election misinformation
- YouTube’s policies fail to acknowledge the real threat
- Good election tweets
For all followers today:
- The AI industry really should slow down a little
- This year has given us a bounty of innovations. We could use some time to absorb them
- Good tweet about LinkedIn
For all followers today:
- Why TikTok's future has never been so cloudy
- ByteDance thought it had a deal with the government in August. Then came the bans — and a spying scandal
- Good tweet about dry January
For subscribers today:
- How Musk is borrowing from X to build Grok
- From servers to people, Musk is looking across his empire to catch up in AI
- Good Facebook post
For subscribers today:
- Meta braces for layoffs
- A twist in Twitter's trust and safety layoffs, and a new verification mess
- Good tweet about voting
For all followers today:
- Google's most serious antitrust challenge to date
- The US government is coming after the company's ad business — and it might win
- Good tweet about Tahoe
For subscribers today:
- YouTube defends its structure
- One man runs both product and trust and safety at the company. Should he?
- Good TikTok about an orangutan
For all followers today:
- Amazon gets the message
- In his farewell letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos finally confronts his labor issues
- Good tweet about donuts
For all followers today:
- The real scandal inside Facebook's cross-check program
- It's not the program itself — it's the inequality it perpetuates
- Good tweet about third-party data
For subscribers today:
- Four questions platforms should answer before launching AI features
- PLUS: Musk gets his view count back up
- Good tweet about Rihanna
For all followers today:
- The states sue Meta over child safety
- Everyone agrees there's a teen mental health crisis. Is this how you fix it?
- Good post about getting married
For all followers today:
- Inside Discord’s reform movement for banned users
- Most platforms ban their trolls forever. Discord wants to rehabilitate them
- Good post about work emails
For subscribers today:
- How Sundar Pichai is thinking about AI
- Three takeaways about Google's approach to this moment, after an interview with Google's CEO
- Good tweet about the early bird
For subscribers today:
- Apple draws a line on encryption
- The fight for real privacy gains a powerful ally — but will it come at the cost of child safety?
- Good tweet about Vin Diesel
For subscribers today:
- AI's missing user interface
- Do next-generation chatbots need to be more specialized — or just easier to use?
- Good tweet about MAMA
For subscribers today:
- Twitter gets deepfaked
- A phony viral photo of an attack at the Pentagon reveals deep flaws in the company's trust and safety systems
- Good tweet about primes
For subscribers today:
- Facebook goes Meta
- Q&A with
@shelbygrossman
of the new Journal for Online Trust and Safety
- News on Facebook departures
- Those Meta tweets