Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

At least one Meta employee thinks it's a good time to add facial recognition technology to glasses because we're too distracted by fascism to effectively protest www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

February 13, 2026 at 3:41 PM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

I wrote about the strange emails I'm getting from fans of GPT-4o ahead of its "retirement" and the danger of the model that always tells you what you want to hear www.platformer.news/gpt-4o-sunse...

Another emailer spoke to the, uhh, singularity of 4o, writing that they had “documented behavioral patterns across extended use — the model's self-correction improving without being prompted, its tonal consistency holding under contradictory emotional input, and what I call ‘recursion fidelity’ — the model maintaining coherence across months of interaction rather than defaulting to agreement.”

I find myself unsettled by messages like this, which read like a sci-fi story about alien intelligences conscripting their human hosts to plead for their survival. If anything, this phenomenon — 4o seeming to write its own eulogy through prompts from its users — is an argument that OpenAI should have retired 4o sooner.

February 13, 2026 at 1:35 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

How does this man think that rewiring brains works www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/t...

“It’s not trying to get in your brain and rewire it,” Luis Li, YouTube’s lawyer, said of the app’s video recommendation algorithm. “It’s just asking you what you like to watch.”

February 10, 2026 at 9:23 PM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

The walls are closing in on infinite-scroll feeds and other addictive design mechanics. I wrote about how lawyers and regulators may have finally found a way around Section 230 www.platformer.news/social-media...

But they are arriving at the fight in a weaker position than usual. In a polarized world, their failures around child safety are increasingly the one thing that partisans of every stripe can agree on. Regulators are no longer impressed by the bare minimum. (They have teenagers of their own now, and all the screen-time battles that come with them.)

I don’t know which trial or regulatory action will be the one that finally forces major changes to social platforms for teenagers. But it seems increasingly clear that change is in fact coming. And for the first time, some subset of users will find that the feed they are scrolling through suddenly comes to an end.

February 10, 2026 at 1:46 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

Last week @ellamarkianos.bsky.social pitched me on the idea of trying to replace herself with a bot. Ella is irreplaceable, but her piece on building "Claudella" is sharp, funny and moving www.platformer.news/journalism-j...

I’ve had many conversations with my fellow AI reporters about what moats we might have against the advancement of AI automation. Chief among them are developing relationships with human sources, reporting on scenes in person, and getting scoops that people wouldn’t entrust an AI with.

But the things I love most about AI reporting are having an excuse to read really long computer science papers and then writing about them. I worry that if AI becomes a great writer and research assistant, AI journalism will mostly become about networking.

February 6, 2026 at 1:18 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

I wrote about using Spotify's new prompted playlists as a way to explore my own tastes again, instead of simply being dragged around by an algorithm www.platformer.news/spotify-prom...

For years now, we’ve worried — justly — about the flattening effect that AI has on taste. Instead of encouraging us to pursue our own individual interests, it can feel as if AI only ever drags you back to the median. (My Hard Fork co-host Kevin Roose calls this “machine drift.”) If you have autoplay enabled on Spotify, you’ve likely experienced a version of this: the way that the algorithm will take a song that you mostly like and slowly ruin it for you over the course of weeks of relentless autoplaying.

Prompted playlists, on the other hand, hand you back that lost agency. It’s an AI tool that helps you explore your own taste, rather than a system to replace it.

February 4, 2026 at 1:00 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

I wrote about falling in and out love with Clawdbot/Moltbot www.platformer.news/moltbot-claw...

It was around this time that I realized an AI employee who works for you 24/7 isn’t much use if they have no idea what they are, or what they can do, or what you are talking about. The daily briefing of my dreams had come to feel like an albatross. Asking it to do anything more complicated felt, at least in this moment, like a waste of time and tokens.

I had become the character I described here earlier this month: the manager who believed he was using AI to make himself more productive, while in reality I was only creating problems for my future self to solve.

January 30, 2026 at 1:08 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

Authors of a big new study on teens and social media say that Australia-style bans won't help. But that misses the mounting evidence of direct harms that platforms cause countless kids: www.platformer.news/social-media...

The next time you go to Las Vegas, you’ll notice that there are no 13-year-olds in the casinos. The reason is not because a series of longitudinal studies proved to the satisfaction of the gaming industry that gambling causes anxiety and depression. Rather, there are no 13-year-olds in casinos because we know that the environment is designed to exploit them.

Research like the Manchester study can offer important insights into narrow questions. But it would be a mistake to rely on it to set policy. For that you need the full picture, and the full picture of children’s experience on social media over the past decade is damning.

January 28, 2026 at 1:52 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

Wrote about this grim moment when the White House sees the deaths of innocent Americans as meme fodder and the faint silver lining that their lies aren't working this time www.platformer.news/minneapolis-...

Here, at last, was a case where Trump’s lies found few buyers. Pretti’s death, which anyone could see from multiple angles on social platforms, shocked the conscience of Democrats and Republicans alike. Even in a world where video can be fabricated, Pretti’s death had enough witnesses and enough documentary evidence that few were willing to disbelieve their eyes.

The question now is how long that state of affairs will hold. We only know what happened in the Good and Pretti cases because they happened in the open, in the full view of other protesters and journalists who were filming. In future cases the evidence may be more limited, or ambiguous. And among the many grim lessons of the past few weeks it is that the worse it looks for Trump, the more likely it is that we will be lied to.

January 27, 2026 at 1:28 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

A survey found that two-thirds of employees say AI saved them zero to two hours a week, while it saved their bosses eight hours. What gives? www.platformer.news/ai-productiv...

One possibility is that the executives here have fallen into the same trap that the open-source developers did. They are answering all their emails with Gemini; they are creating slides with ChatGPT; they have five Claude Code agents running on six different monitors tackling different projects they came up with over the weekend. And while these tools are outputting a massive amount of … something, the business itself is not making any more money.

January 23, 2026 at 1:34 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

I continue to be fascinated by the huge prevalence of scams and illegal ads on Meta platforms www.platformer.news/meta-scams-g...

But Miller said Meta told the gambling commission to use Meta’s own artificial intelligence tools — Llama, I guess? — to find and report bad ads. “The situation we all face is that regulatory resources or taxpayer money around the world is currently having to be spent on doing Meta’s job for them,” Miller said.

And it is a global issue. Earlier this month, Rest of World used Meta’s ad library to find illegal gambling ads running on Meta platforms in at least 13 countries. Dozens of pages ran nearly 1,000 illegal ads across the Middle East and Asia, according to the outlet's December analysis. Malaysia’s communications minister said in September that it had submitted more than 120,000 takedown requests to Meta over gambling issues.

January 21, 2026 at 2:18 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

Naming my dating company and singles mixer after the villain of the Saw franchise

sign for "Jigsaw Dating Singles Event This Way" with QR code to download the app

January 18, 2026 at 5:09 PM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

ChatGPT woke us up to the possibilities that that come from generating text. Claude Code is now doing the same thing for tools. I wrote about five things I built with it to help me as a writer www.platformer.news/claude-code-...

Build a searchable database of your own work. I’ve always wanted a database of my writing that I could run semantic queries on. Stuff like: “When was the last time I wrote a column about Grok?” Or, “what criticisms have people made of the Meta Oversight Board?” It is possible to get answers to these questions via Google. But I’ve always wanted answers grounded in my own work, with quick links to the relevant materials.

After describing this idea to Claude, it went to work. It exported 818 editions of Platformer into a folder of text files organized by date, and then connected it to Claude. Now when I ask Claude questions about my archive, it reads through relevant posts and gives me an answer. I have wanted something like this for nearly half a decade now, and Claude built it in less than half an hour.

January 16, 2026 at 1:33 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

What I learned when I cloned my own voice. (And how you can now get a narrated version of Platformer in your podcast player of choice) www.platformer.news/platformer-v...

There is also the question of whether voice-clone me sounds — and this is the word early listeners keep using — boring. My beats don’t often lend themselves to chipper, upbeat coverage, and you can really hear this in the voice clone.

Still, for the most part, I don’t find the narration much duller than I might find the average news bulletin on NPR. The dry professionalism of the clone struggles to convey my more emotional writing. But it’s more than serviceable, and I imagine it will continue to improve as the underlying technology does.

January 14, 2026 at 1:14 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

High five, Dave www.wired.com/story/roblox...

In fact, WIRED has found multiple examples of people advertising age-verified accounts for minors as young as 9 years old on eBay for as little as $4.

January 13, 2026 at 7:18 PM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

Wrote about how the Grok scandal upended our notion that platforms would do even the bare minimum to prevent attacks against their own user base www.platformer.news/grock-blocke...

France, Australia, and India have also all announced investigations into Grok. In truth, though, there is very little to investigate. Thousands of public posts tell the grim story. No one is disputing that xAI made available to its user base a tool that puts women and children into their underwear — or worse — against their will. No one is disputing that some of this content is illegal in many of the countries where xAI operates. And no one is disputing that Grok continues to generate this kind of material on demand.

When deepfakes first emerged as an online harm, I took some comfort in the notion that they likely would not spread virally. Individuals might send them via messages, I thought, but platforms would intervene to remove violating posts — particularly posts targeting children. Never could I have imagined that someday the former Twitter would deploy tools that enable and amplify those harms, and would dismiss any attempts to rein the company in as “censorship.”

January 13, 2026 at 1:05 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

It's all fun and games until the AI takes your job: I wrote about the wonder of building a website in Claude Code and the unsettling knowledge that it's coming for my job, too www.platformer.news/claude-code-...

Whether this feels like a good bargain or a bad one depends on where you sit. For the moment, Claude Code feels to me like a superpower. (What better way to fight the dying of the web, after all, than by building more websites?)

But my enthusiasm is tempered by the knowledge that the technology that came for the Tailwind engineers is coming for me, too. Today Claude Code and its peers can make some incredible websites. Another year from now, I suspect they will be making much more.

January 9, 2026 at 1:26 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

Some good new reporting on the ongoing Grok nightmare from @hadasgold.bsky.social www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/t...

At one meeting in recent weeks before the latest controversy erupted, Musk held a meeting with xAI staffers from various teams where he “was really unhappy” over restrictions on Grok’s Imagine image and video generator, the first source with knowledge of the situation at xAI said.

Around the time of the meeting with Musk, three xAI staffers who had worked on the company’s already small safety team publicly announced on X that they were leaving the company – Vincent Stark, head of product safety; Norman Mu, who led the post-training and reasoning safety team; and Alex Chen, who led personality and model behavior post training.

January 8, 2026 at 7:42 PM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

In which @ellamarkianos.bsky.social braves an AI consciousness conference to meet the people working on model welfare www.platformer.news/ai-conscious...

My conversation with the researchers turned to work. One works on model behavior, an area of research focused on shaping AI systems’ personalities. His goal is to give models “aura,” he said.

“Bro, you have aura,” the other researcher told him. “You smell great. What are you wearing?” (It was Louis Vuitton, Ombre Nomade.)

January 7, 2026 at 1:31 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

The author of a viral Reddit thread alleging fraud at a food delivery company tried to back up his claim by sending me AI-generated documents. Today I'm publishing those documents in the hopes that it helps other reporter see what we're up against in the age of AI www.platformer.news/fake-uber-ea...

The whistleblower, for his part, worked to amp up the pressure. He told me he had shared the document with other reporters, putting me into a competitive crunch. He asked when I thought I would publish. I asked him if he could point me to any current or former coworkers of his who could help me understand the document better. “Not really,” he said.

By this point, alarm bells were starting to ring. I wondered if the employee badge the whistleblower had shared with me might have been AI-generated. While AI systems are notoriously unreliable at identifying their own outputs, Google Gemini can detect SynthID watermarks embedded in images that it produces. I uploaded the badge to Gemini and asked if Gemini had made it. “Most or all of this image was edited or generated with Google AI,” it said.

January 6, 2026 at 1:08 AM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

Last year I wrote about how strange it is that Apple rates Grok as appropriate for kids 12+ in the App Store. I checked this morning in the wake of Grok's CSAM/nudification scandals and can report that ... Apple now rates Grok as appropriate for kids 13+.

January 5, 2026 at 7:00 PM

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

Another great @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social investigation into Meta, this one about the company's secret playbook for deceiving and manipulating the regulators investigating its massive scam problem www.reuters.com/investigatio...