Platformer is an independent publication devoted to exploring the intersection of technology platforms and society. It was founded in 2020 by me, technology journalist Casey Newton.

Platformer publishes on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays at 5PM PT, and sometimes on particularly newsy Wednesdays and Fridays. You can subscribe here. Offering a mix of original reporting, analysis, commentary, and curated links, the newsletter effectively serves as a daily live blog of Silicon Valley’s AI era.

More than 200,000 people trust Platformer to keep them informed on the day’s most important developments. Subscribers include executives at Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Snap, along with their counterparts in academia, government, and journalism.

What does Platformer cover?

My focus evolves with the news, and I intend to update this list at least quarterly. Here’s what I’m obsessed with right now:

• Artificial intelligence and its consequences. How are AI companies and their products reshaping work, creativity, and daily life? Which frontier-lab pronouncements can safely be dimissed as hype — and which should we take more seriously? How can we mitigate AI safety risks, from the immediate harm of chatbot-inspired delusions to the longer-term risks of job displacement and superintelligence?
• The politics of technology. How are tech platforms and their leaders navigating the return of the Trump administration? What happens when platforms abandon their commitments to content moderation, fact-checking, and trust and safety under political pressure? How is conservative activism reshaping AI development?
• Platform governance in retreat. What is the future of content moderation as platforms scale back their efforts? What are the consequences of Meta's abandonment of fact-checking and embrace of Community Notes? Do institutions like Meta’s Oversight Board still have a role to play when its creator is moving in the opposite direction?
• Antitrust and the law. Will the government succeed in breaking up the big platforms? How might legal remedies might reshape the tech industry? How are courts adjudicating questions of platform power, privacy, and speech?
• The fracturing social web. What does competition between Threads, Bluesky, X, and TikTok mean for how we communicate online? Can decentralized networks and protocols succeed? What happens to TikTok now that it has been sold to an American consortium?
• The AI industry's uncertain economics. Is AI a bubble? Can startups compete with deep-pocketed incumbents? Which business models will survive?
• AI's effect on the web. How is AI-powered search changing the economics of journalism? What happens to the creators, reporters, and businesses that depend on web traffic? What is the future of the open web?

How do you see the world?

I began writing a daily newsletter in October 2017, as a cultural and regulatory backlash against big technology companies began to accelerate around the world. Revelations that foreign actors had manipulated Facebook, Twitter, and other sites caused me to reevaluate my old, blinkered assumption that social networks were only harmless fun. I once covered tech platforms primarily as businesses; starting in 2017, I began to cover them more as quasi-states whose actions are having increasingly profound effects on the world around them.

From 2017 to 2021, Platformer was a newsletter of the Trump era: focused on questions of foreign interference, misinformation and disinformation, political polarization, the challenges of content moderation, and other intersections between tech and democracy.

In the Biden era, these issues continue to be relevant, though to varying degrees. (“Misinformation” is thankfully a lesser concern in a world in which the commander in chief is not a pathological liar.) Meanwhile, a new set of themes has emerged as core to the Platformer project: the rise of artificial intelligence; a resurgent global antitrust movement; the splintering of the internet; the emergence of Europe as the key regulator of the Western internet; and new authoritarian pressures mounting against platforms in India, Russia, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, an even darker future is gathering in plain sight: in the United States, Trump’s continuing promotion of the Big Lie, and its near-total embrace by the Republican party, threaten to end American democracy as we know it.