Last month, OpenAI shut down Sora, its attempt at a social-media app, as part of a pivot away from a “do everything all at once” strategy that the company says left it on the “defensive” against companies like Anthropic. The story made sense. Claude Code was the new ChatGPT, and the race to build more capable coding and productivity models was the big prize. Then, this week, OpenAI made another announcement: It had acquired TBPN, the business-and-tech-centric video podcast. Fidji Simo, the former Meta executive who had been messaging the firm’s return-to-focus plan for weeks, tried to explain the rationale for a strange deal that nobody in the industry had seen coming:

As I’ve been thinking about the future of how we communicate at OpenAI, one thing that’s become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re driving a really big technological shift. And with our mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity comes a responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates—with builders and people using the technology at the center.

As I’ve been thinking about the future of how we communicate at OpenAI, one thing that’s become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re driving a really big technological shift. And with our mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity comes a responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates—with builders and people using the technology at the center.

I wouldn’t say that buying a friendly but independent outlet and immediately portraying it as an extension of your communications strategy is a sure thing, “conversation”-wise, but if you’ve watched TBPN’s fluent, chummy interviews with executives like Sam Altman, you can at least understand why they like it (after the purchase, Altman called it his “favorite tech show”). Still, the deal, valued in the “low hundreds of millions,” produced a lot of confusion. OpenAI was supposed to be avoiding “side-quests.” Why was it investing in podcasts?

One answer: Maybe the AI industry had seen the recent news about social media. Last week, Meta lost a pair of high-profile court cases centering on harms to young users, and plaintiffs, politicians, and commentators settled on a frame: It was social media’s “big tobacco” moment. A novel legal approach had finally panned out, potentially opening the floodgates for thousands more lawsuits and inviting new regulation. The juries, presented with the same technical arguments made in countless other courtrooms over the last decade, now seemed straightforwardly fed up with representatives of social-media companies that profess to be careful and thoughtful about dealing with young people while, in private, as jurors heard, routinely shared messages like, “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.”

They also may have noticed how the public responded with a combination of relief and celebration. By the time these verdicts came down, school phone bans had swept across the country, and state-level attempts to ban minors from using social media were following closely behind. Public sentiment had already turned, in a broad and visceral way, against social media, and not just around kids. You could sense this in Meta’s narrow, helpless, and almost annoyed public-relations strategy in the week since the news. Andy Stone, its head of comms, reshared posts arguing that the California case was “a victory for the plaintiffs bar — not for children or society” and that it was a “blow against free speech.” He boosted multiple people taking issue with the whole “tobacco” thing: a Reason podcast lamenting social-media “prohibitionism” and stating the fact that tobacco is a “chemical” while social media is, actually, in fact, I think you’ll find, a “delivery system for speech,” and, yes, ​​a TBPN post suggesting to readers that “it might be worth revisiting what exactly is addictive about cigarettes.”

"As people compare social media to the cigarette industry, it might be worth revisiting what exactly is addictive about cigarettes. Nicotine... ...it certainly seems like what pulls people into social media is more the humans that create content on the platform."-@johncoogan https://t.co/dG9o3LYYkF— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 30, 2026

"As people compare social media to the cigarette industry, it might be worth revisiting what exactly is addictive about cigarettes. Nicotine... ...it certainly seems like what pulls people into social media is more the humans that create content on the platform."-@johncoogan https://t.co/dG9o3LYYkF

Whatever the merits of their defenses — and, as Mike Masnick at TechDirt argues, there are more than some online-safety advocates are comfortable admitting — they have lately been, to be blunt, losing the public debate. The legal and rhetorical framework within which Meta and others long built their businesses — the laws protecting platforms from liability aren’t perfect, but without them, the........

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