Trump
When murder becomes a meme
Truth and terror in Minneapolis. PLUS: TikTok conspiracy theories, and Dario Amodei's Oppenheimer moment
Founder and editor of Platformer, a publication about the intersection of tech and democracy. Prior to founding Platformer in October 2020, Newton was the longtime Silicon Valley editor of The Verge.
Trump
Truth and terror in Minneapolis. PLUS: TikTok conspiracy theories, and Dario Amodei's Oppenheimer moment
AI
Managers say it makes them more productive. Workers don't. What gives?
Meta
Plus: Writers react to Claude Code for writers; Elon Musk vs. OpenAI; and ChatGPT gets ads
Anthropic
Five useful things I’ve built so far. Plus: Grok caves, and Thinking Machines implodes
AI
Announcing Platformer+, a new way to listen to our columns
Grok
More than a week into a deepfake scandal, a handful of foreign governments have found the strength to do what Apple, Google, and the United States will not
AI
I feel great about the website I’m building — and terrible for professional website builders. PLUS: Who will stop Grok? And ChatGPT will see you now
Deepfakes
A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5
AI
PLUS: What I got right (and wrong) about 2025
Regulation
The US is retaliating against the EU after it fined X — and now some of Europe's biggest companies are caught in the crossfire
Meta
A fresh investigation reveals the scope of Meta's problem in China. Will a pending court case force the company to crack down — or destroy Section 230?
OpenAI
A decade years in, what started as a sci-fi lab is now focused on engagement and growth. What does that mean for building AI safely?
Child Safety
How social networks lost the argument. PLUS: All worked up over Nvidia's H200
X
By banning an ad account on a flimsy pretext, X demonstrated the exact behavior that led the European Union to fine it. PLUS: The state AI law moratorium is back, and the Paramount-Netflix fight
Oversight Board
Five years after the Oversight Board's creation, few are satisfied with the result. Can it be saved?
Algorithms
A new study offers evidence for what we’ve long suspected: rage bait is distorting our politics. PLUS: The David Sacks discourse, and Claude Opus 4.5 debuts