This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.
Today, after a long weekend of awful terrorist violence in Israel, let’s talk about the shifting landscape for social networks amid the current crisis — and consider the path ahead for Meta’s Threads app.
I.
For more than a decade, whenever calamity struck, hundreds of millions of people flocked to Twitter. Its blend of first-person accounts, verified journalists sharing reporting and context, and a broad range of commentary made it the best app for understanding what was going on in the world at any given moment.
Twitter was by no means perfect, of course. It amplified misinformation, provided a stage…
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