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@nytimes

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@crumbler

. casey@platformer.news | mastodon.social/@caseynewton

San Franciscoplatformer.newsBorn June 19Joined August 2009

892 Following

206.6K Followers

Casey Newton’s Tweets

News at the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy. On Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 5PM Pacific. Click to read Platformer, by Casey Newton, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of...

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Obviously there's no place like Twitter but I do have a couple lifeboats under construction! Mastodon: mastodon.social/@CaseyNewton Instagram: instagram.com/crumbler/ And of course

platformer.news

Platformer

For the final edition of

of the year — and maybe my last tweet ever???? — here are 13 predictions for 2023. Wrote this earlier this afternoon. Timelier now! platformer.news/p/13-predictio

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NEW: Twitter has a plan to force you to opt in to personalized ads to continue using this app.

@ZoeSchiffer

and me in

: platformer.news/p/twitters-ris

And it’s not just personalized ads that Twitter plans to require. The company is also considering forcing users to share their location, let Twitter share their data with its business partners, and use contact data phone numbers used in two-factor authentication for ad targeting purposes. (In May, Twitter paid a $150 million fine for doing this without obtaining users consent.)

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Dec 13

Then, from me, why we are beginning to leave Twitter behind. platformer.news/p/how-elon-bot

Now, awaiting Musk’s latest tweets, I find myself anxious that one of his former employees could be physically assaulted or worse over what the CEO is posting. I don’t know how, in that environment, to make little jokes about Google’s latest failed messaging app, or bad PR pitches, or any of the other bits I have been doing on Twitter forever. I don’t know how to pretend that what is happening is not actually happening. I don’t want to provide, even in the smallest of ways, a respectable backdrop against which hate speech against my fellow LGBTQ people, or Black or Jewish or any other people, can flourish.

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It’s a double issue of

today. First up,

@ZoeSchiffer

has the story of how the company botched an effort to get rid of bots over the weekend. platformer.news/p/how-elon-bot

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 SMS messages from Twitter, impacting people with two-factor authentication. Then it blocked traffic from those carriers completely.

From 5:35 AM to 6:45 AM PT on Sunday, Twitter shut down access to the primary telecom providers in India and Russia, as well as the second biggest telecom company in Indonesia, Platformer has learned.

Almost immediately, complaints started to roll in, as legitimate users found they were unable to access Twitter.

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Whatever Twitter used to be for me died over the weekend. We'll have more reporting + thoughts in

Casey Newton (@caseynewton@mastodon.social)

today but in the meantime here's also this!

mastodon.social

29 Posts, 38 Following, 4.88K Followers · Millennial content creator

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Dana "Legacy Blue Checkmark" Hull

@danahull

Dec 11

I wasn't planning to work this Saturday but

@elonmusk

's attacks on

@yoyoel

cannot be ignored. w/

@KurtWagner8

bloomberg.com

Elon Musk Steps Up Attacks on Twitter’s Former Safety Head

Elon Musk posted tweets including an excerpt of Yoel Roth’s doctoral dissertation Saturday that suggested the former Twitter executive is an advocate for child sexualization — a baseless trope that...

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Zoë Schiffer

@ZoeSchiffer

Dec 10

NEW: Elon Musk is threatening to sue Twitter employees who leak confidential information to the press. He's asking staffers to sign a pledge indicating they've understood. Here's the email:

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Tim Miller

@Timodc

Dec 10

The New AI Is Magic. Plus right wing scam culture. This weeks Bulwark newsletter of newsletters feat: ⁦

This probably doesn't end well.

⁩ ⁦

@benthompson

⁩ ⁦

@RichardHanania

⁩

thetriad.thebulwark.com

The New AI Is Magic

Can ChatGPT Make This Podcast?

It’s Hard Fork Friday! This week Kevin and I have a lot of fun with ChatGPT, then bring on

@metaviv

to warn us about what could go wrong (and how to fix it)

nytimes.com

OpenAI’s new chatbot is a coder, a teacher, a potential Google killer, and … a friend?

Wow! What’s next, an iOS app? A login screen?

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Techmeme

@Techmeme

In an email to advertisers, Twitter says it will launch controls to prevent ads from showing up next to tweets containing certain keywords as soon as next week (@sheila_dang / Reuters) reuters.com/technology/twi techmeme.com/221209/p15#a22

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Wrote about Apple standing up for encryption, standing down for CSAM scanning, and what to make of the fact that says it will still work to detect nudes at the point of creation — in its own apps and others platformer.news/p/apple-draws-

Moreover, it’s notable that the technology Apple is now touting when it comes to child safety — a way to identify nudes as they are created and alert parents — is simply a different kind of on-device scanning. Certainly it’s less fraught than a technology that submits reports to NCMEC, which could result in the police showing up at your door. But these debates often center arguments about slippery slopes — particularly fears that governments take a capability developed to serve one purpose and force companies to use it for another. People were terrified last year, for example, that China might submit hashes of protest imagery to a database and force Apple to check the contents of users’ phones against it.

Viewed through that lens, I wonder if the Electronic Frontier Foundation wasn’t getting ahead of itself when it offered Apple full-throated praise this week for “dropping phone-scanning plans.” Particularly since the company says it will seek to expand that capability to other apps.

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The FTC is suing Microsoft to block its Activision Blizzard purchase

nilay patel

@reckless

Dec 8

Microsoft tried everything to avoid FTC trying to block Activision deal but it was always inevitable I think

theverge.com

It’s a big challenge to Microsoft’s planned acquisition.

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It was literally a dream to go on Fresh Air and talk to Terry Gross about this website!!

npr.org

Chaos reigns at Twitter as Musk manages 'by whims'

Tech journalist Casey Newton says Elon Musk did not inherit a company in crisis — but after massive layoffs and upheaval the social media giant is losing money and Musk is warning of bankruptcy.

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Thank you

for teaching me a newly relevant term for understanding AI weirdness: “capability overhang” theverge.com/2022/12/8/2349

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House passes landmark legislation to protect same-sex, interracial marriages

Amy B Wang

@amybwang

Dec 8

Just in: In a 258-169 vote, House passes Respect for Marriage Act to protect same-sex and interracial marriages, with Senate amendment to clarify religious liberties. Now heads to Biden's desk to be signed into law.

washingtonpost.com

President Biden has said he would sign the landmark legislation that would enshrine marriage equality in federal law, granting protections to same-sex and interracial couples.

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Twitter 1.0 generated $5 billion a year and covered employees’ hotel costs. Fortunately both issues have now been fixed

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James Clayton

@JamesClayton5

NEW: The BBC has obtained pictures of inside Twitter - rooms that have been converted into bedrooms - for staff to sleep in. The city of San Francisco is investigating as it's a commercial building.

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Thank you

& co!! wsj.com/articles/tensi

Mr. Benioff, who is also co-founder, became frustrated about how Mr. Taylor was spending his time, the people said. Among his concerns were whether Mr. Taylor was spending too much time in a new role as Twitter Inc.’s chairman, too much time with other CEOs and customers and not enough time on Salesforce product and engineering, the people said.

While the two had worked well together, cracks started forming in recent months that created friction between the men, the people familiar with the matter said. Ahead of Salesforce’s announcement that Mr. Taylor would exit, there was some discussion about trying to work things out and arranging for Mr. Taylor to stay for another year or so, but that didn’t pan out, some of the people said.

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Joanna Stern

@JoannaStern

WSJ News Exclusive | Apple Plans New Encryption System to Ward Off Hackers and Protect iCloud Data

BIG NEWS: Apple is finally bringing end-to-end encryption to most of iCloud, including backups, Photos, Notes and more. Apple’s calling it Advanced Data Protection. Full story here, including my exclusive interview with Craig Federighi:

wsj.com

The optional feature would keep most data secure that’s stored in iCloud, a service used to back up iPhones or save specific device data such as Messages. The data would be protected in the event...

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Argument for: Instagram has basically every conceivable advantage over everyone else trying here Argument against: Instagram already has too many different competing products inside it If I were them I’d do it anyway!

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Techmeme

@Techmeme

Sources: seeking to capitalize on chaos at Twitter, Meta discussed several product ideas, including expanding Instagram Notes or building a text-focused app (@kalleyhuang / New York Times) nytimes.com/2022/12/07/tec techmeme.com/221207/p17#a22

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Moving my gay group chat to Microsoft Teams

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The Verge

@verge

Microsoft Teams adds free communities feature to take on Facebook and Discord theverge.com/2022/12/7/2349

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Facebook’s Oversight Board agreed today that a controversial system like cross-check is necessary. But it also found that the program enabled some staggering inequality — and that’s its own kind of scandal platformer.news/p/the-real-sca

Importantly, though, the board fundamentally supports the idea of a secondary review system. It acknowledges that large-scale content moderation systems will inevitably make mistakes, and that Meta should act to reduce them. And it accepts that this means designating some accounts for special protections.

At the same time, the board finds that Meta’s implementation of such a system is deeply problematic, and arguably a scandal of its own. For example, while just 9 percent of Facebook’s daily active users are from the United States or Canada, 42 percent of all the ERSR content reviewed by the company came from those two countries. It’s a powerful illustration of something we have long known: that as inadequate as content moderation can feel to us North Americans, the situation is much worse in the rest of the world. And that can and does lead to very real harms.

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Dec 6

Parents — the holidays are almost upon us, and kids will soon have more free time on their hands than usual. Here’s how to prevent them from interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried

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Dec 6

Hearing from some people that these tweets did not put them in a good mood. Sorry but this is state-of-the-art technology. It’s literally the best we can do

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Good morning

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Ok here’s MY take on ChatGPT, including a section on exactly why it makes Google look so outdated platformer.news/p/the-promise-

Looking at the search results page compared to the chat transcript, Google feels positively prehistoric to me. The search box effectively returned an entire project — read these blog posts that we have ranked according to whatever arcane signals; dive into related questions that people are also asking — while ChatGPT3 just told me what I wanted to know.

Of course, by now the Googlers reading this are likely pounding their desks. There are good reasons why Google doesn’t do this! If Google extracted all knowledge and understanding from the web and returned answers without so much as naming its sources, much less linking to them, hearings and regulation would follow around the world.

All of this is true so far as it goes. And yet … looking at the two results here, it seems clear to me which of these two approaches looks more like the future of search. And it isn’t Google’s.

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Wait till the feds find out he’s been testing Twitter on humans

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Kenneth Li

@kenli729

Big scoop by @rachael_levy / Exclusive: Musk’s Neuralink faces federal probe, employee backlash over animal tests reuters.com/technology/mus

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We’re off to a good start

write a poem about Stewart Butterfield and Bret Taylor leaving Salesforce and Marc Benioff consolidating his power

ChatGPT: Once, at Salesforce's helm,
Butterfield and Taylor shone,
But Benioff's power grew,
And they were forced to move on.

Their time was up, the writing clear,
As Benioff's grip grew tight,
No longer could they hold their place,
In this corporate fight.

But though they may have lost this round,
Their legacy lives on,
In the products they created,
The seeds of innovation sown.

And though Benioff now rules supreme,
His reign may not last long,
For in the world of business,
Change is always in the air, and strong.

So let this be a lesson,
To all who seek to rise,
In the game of corporate power,
Only the strongest survive.

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I would love to read a really gossipy piece about what the hell is going on at Salesforce right now

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Techmeme

@Techmeme

Internal memo: Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield plans to leave Salesforce in January, says the move has "nothing to do" with Bret Taylor's departure (@ellenbthom / Insider) businessinsider.com/slack-ceo-stew techmeme.com/221205/p17#a22

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Due to the general amnesty now offered all accounts on Twitter I plan to commit the following crimes: - quote-tweeting a story I know nothing about with “seems bad” - referring to anything I have written as “my latest” - tweeting about my 2022 bingo card

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Dec 2

Anyway it’s nice to see some actual competition here, and to see a startup shipping things that Google has been talking about eventually getting around to since 2012

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Like I’ve sat in endless briefings over the years about Google’s “knowledge graph” and trying to build the Star Trek computer or whatever, but the company is so fat and lazy that it mostly just ships new ad units

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I imagine that Google will begrudgingly, belatedly catch up to the sort of stuff that you can do today with ChatGPT, but it’s amazing how stagnant and prehistoric Google now looks for a lot of things

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Editor: How’s that story coming along Me:

Dear Editor,

Thank you for inquiring about the status of the story. I am currently in the process of gathering information and conducting interviews for the piece. I expect to have a draft ready for review within the next week.

If you have any specific requests or suggestions for the article, please let me know and I will be happy to incorporate them.

Best regards,
[Journalist's Name]

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Elon’s Two-Day War with Apple + How to Beat an A.I. Censor + S.B.F.’s ‘Bad Month’

Dec 2

It’s Hard Fork Friday! Featuring Elon’s two-day war with Apple, how to beat an AI censor, and Kevin and I listening slack-jawed as SBF talks about his “bad month”

nytimes.com

Musk takes on tech’s fight against the Apple “tax.”