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From fuelling genocide in Myanmar, kowtowing to authoritarian regimes and causing an epidemic of depression among teenagers, Noam Bardin has watched aghast as the platforms that promised to bring people closer together tore at the connective tissue of society. “Social media has become the worst of us”, the serial tech entrepreneur tells The Independent in an interview. “That’s by design. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” So he decided to build his own, Post, with a vision to reinvent the relationship between social media, its users and news publishers. Post launched in the App Store on 15 June, one of a number of start-ups vying to usurp Twitter as it lurches through a series of crises. Post’s soft launch When Twitter imploded last October during Elon Musk’s tortuous $44bn takeover, a flood of high-profile users announced they were ditching the site. Mr Bardin spotted an opportunity, and decided to rush Post into beta testing. He soon had more than 350,000 people on a waiting list, and initially allowed around 65,000 users onto the site. Mr Bardin said the decision to launch and capitalise on the chaos at Twitter may have been premature, but it allowed him to iron out flaws and convince news outlets that the app’s profit-sharing model could work. “Once we came out, suddenly, publishers were willing to come on board.” Mr Musk’s ownership has been plagued by a series of erratic decisions, including firing content moderators, promoting conspiracy theorists, declaring war on what he calls the “woke mind virus”, and using it as a tool to boost his own profile. The billionaire may not have been the cause of all of Twitter’s woes, but he certainly hasn’t helped, says Mr Bardin. “Twitter was a sick company before. It didn’t have a good business model. It couldn’t afford what it was doing. It didn’t provide value for the creators, and the toxicity was off the charts, right? “All these are kind of assuming that Twitter was an amazing, healthy company before Elon Musk came? Elon Musk obviously did his bit to destroy it.” Mr Musk’s belief that he could run a social media company was typical of the attitude among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, he said. “Silicon Valley is full of really, really smart people who have accomplished tremendous things. And because of that, they assume they can do anything and accomplish anything,” Mr Bardin said. “They like to talk about diversity, and they have diversity of people in terms of their backgrounds, skin colour and race, but everyone has exactly the same engineering MBA from Stanford or somewhere else.” Mr Bardin says he didn’t believe Twitter would ever disappear entirely, but that its profits and trustworthiness will continue to crater as users grow tired of Mr Musk’s antics. Post will inevitably draw comparisons to Twitter, but Mr Bardin sees it more like TikTok, a disruptor that exists alongside and improves an existing idea. ‘Ultimate product person’ Mr Bardin, 52, became a billionaire overnight when he sold his crowdsourced navigation app Waze to Google in 2013, After seven years as a vice president of product at Google, Mr Bardin quit suddenly in 2021. In a blistering farewell post, he wrote that the company mollycoddled its “entitled” employees who were more concerned with personal fulfillment and their 11am yoga classes than the products they worked on. Post was initially entirely self-funded by Mr Bardin. When he unveiled the app in November, he announced that Silicon Valley venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, which manages $35bn in assets, had come on board. Post’s only other investor is Scott Galloway, the author, podcast host and professor of marketing at New York University, who has said he invested “substantial personal capital” in the project. The partnership came about after the pair hit it off when Professor Galloway had the entrepreneur as a guest on his podcast. Professor Galloway, an outspoken critic of tech titans including Mr Musk, told The Independent in an email that he was convinced to invest in Post after hearing Mr Bardin’s vision to reimagine social media as a force for good. “From the outset, Post has been committed to healthier online conversation,” Professor Galloway said. “Elon’s mission, as evidenced by his relentless s***posting and public disdain for our elected leaders, appears to be the opposite.” Professor Galloway described his partner as “the ultimate product person”, a necessity going up against behemoths that invest billions in “keeping eyeballs glued to the screen”. “However, there’s another side to running a business in social, which Noam understands deeply — and that’s mission. “Specifically, what value are you providing to enhance societal discourse such that we can engage in truthful and respectful debate? Most social media companies are sorely lacking in this area, because the ad-based model forces their algorithms to value clicks and engagement over good-faith contributions to public discourse.” Professor Galloway said Mr Bardin was a “rare innovator who hasn’t made the mistake of believing his own press”. “He puts the product and the consumer before his own vanity, and that’s rare in tech these days. We need more leaders like that.” Mr Galloway’s Pivot podcast co-host Kara Swisher is also an adviser on the start-up, helping Mr Bardin connect with publishers. It’s the first time that Ms Swisher, a powerful figure in tech journalism for decades, agreed to help out an entrepreneur, such is her belief in the product. How Post works Post allows users to toggle between three feeds: following, explore and news. Users can follow individuals and topics they are interested in, create their own posts, like and repost other content. When users click on an article, it displays within their feed, rather than taking them through to a news site. For that, users are charged a micropayment of a few cents from their digital wallet, which goes directly to the publisher. More than 30 news organisations, including The Independent, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters and ProPublica, have already signed on as publishing partners. Mr Bardin explains that Post is pioneering a new business model that allows users to find and pay for reliable news. Since the dawn of the internet, media companies have missed “every opportunity” to carve out a slice of profits for themselves, he says. “They’ve been screwed by every tech platform.” He believes that the central idea to fixing social media is rebooting the relationship with news publishers. On Post, publishers can set the price of their content — usually a few cents per article. “We hope that we’ll have the critical mass on our platform that will give that breaking news from everywhere,” Mr Bardin says. “But we think that includes premium publishing, and newsletter writers and experts and creators. There’s a whole slew of new entities who are creating newsworthy content and want to be able to host it all.” A network of journalists, influencers and newsletter publishers including Dan Rather, George Takei and Robert Reich were early adopters of the platform. While keen to reimagine what social media can look like, Mr Bardin says his larger goal is to create a better informed society through promoting reliable information. He sees the rise of authoritarianism in his home country of Israel, Hungary, Poland and the United States as an existential threat similar to the climate crisis. “Americans like to think that Trump is a unique phenomenon. He’s not, he’s part of this wide agenda of authoritarians. And authoritarian regimes have never delivered the goods over time,” he says. “Putting aside global warming, which is the hardware problem, to me authoritarianism is the software problem.” Professor Galloway agreed that the social media giants had failed in their obligations not to “mess up” democracy. “In many cases, they intentionally look the other way and play dumb such that they don’t have to do the hard work of actually dealing with these issues.” Mr Bardin tells The Independent that he would never have caved to Turkish president Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan’s request to censor opposition parties ahead of recent elections. He expects to “have a problem” in India, where the party of prime minister Narendra Modi has made similar requests targeting political opponents, and accepts that Post will likely never be able to operate in China or Russia. “I find it very disheartening when I see so many American companies basically getting on their knees and removing any kind of moral in Western liberal value to try and operate in these countries. You have to be able to stand for something and if it means you lose a market, you lose a market. “Part of the problem is, the Second World War was a long time ago. So we forgot what the world used to be like. And so we’re allowing ourselves now to go down these paths that we know are terrible. “There are a million reasons for this, not just social media, but social media is one of them and it’s the place where I think I can make an impact,” he said. “I’m 52, this is my last company, and this is something I want to do for the next few decades. It’s something I think is super important.” Content moderation Mr Bardin sees Post’s content moderation being driven by the community, with good behaviour being rewarded, while trolls will be aggressively suspended and removed. The more you play by the rules, the more reach your content will receive. “And the more we’re gonna trust you on the platform, while being very aggressive on removing and suspending people that are just there to troll others.” He cites the genocide of Rohingya Muslims by the military dictatorship in Myanmar in 2016 and 2017 as a prime example of how big tech has failed. Facebook, the primary source of news in the country, allowed anti-Islamic hate speech to spread unchecked, which a United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission found played a “determining role” in the massacre, rape and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. “There’s no way that the moderator sitting in a call center in the Philippines will understand the Buddhist verse Muslim animosity in Myanmar. You can’t expect them to ever reach that level of understanding, but everyone in Myanmar understands it,” he said. Building a community to self-police bad behaviour and set its own standards would be key to Post’s success, he added. “We’re the platform for the 85 per cent of people who are not crazy, who want to get their news, get some opinions and say something, but don’t want to be called a fascist or communist.” Read More Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg: Who would win a fight between tech titans? Inside the final days of Twitter 1.0: How Elon Musk razed us to the ground RFK Jr compares Elon Musk to American revolutionaries during conspiracy-driven Twitter event Four people were just locked inside a fake Mars habitat for a year-long study Apple releases urgent update to iPhone and iPad users Twitter hacker who took over Musk, Obama, Biden accounts gets prison sentence

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A player that Manchester City let go reins them back in, in a game that took off. Cole Palmer’s fine stoppage-time penalty was quite an ending to the story of the day, crowning what was probably the match of the season so far. While Chelsea’s late 4-4 draw ensures the defending champions are only a point clear at the top, it felt like this had a significance for more than the title race. It could be a launchpad for Palmer and maybe this Chelsea side, as they finally looked like a proper Mauricio Pochettino team. They pressed and pushed City into a pulsating 4-4 draw, Pep Guardiola’s side doing their own part with some wondrous play. There are a lot of issues with modern football, and it felt like this whole week was dominated by talk of referees, but this game right at the end reminded why we watch. VAR was mercifully muted, not quite silent, but it would feel even more wrong to talk about it after a game like that. This was really about the concentration of quality on show, particularly Reece James, Manuel Akanji, Rodri, Phil Foden, Erling Haaland and - perhaps above all - former City players Raheem Sterling and Palmer. Sterling might well have finished upstaged by Palmer, but he won’t be too bothered about that, not with his goal and the way they clicked together. There is something there. It felt symbolic that all of Chelsea’s front three - including the burgeoning Nicolas Jackson - scored. They are a long way off City’s imperious level, but it is telling they have not yet lost to a big-six side. Chelsea beat Tottenham Hotspur on Monday and have now followed that and previous draws with Liverpool and Arsenal with perhaps the most significant of the lot. It was, somewhat ironically given recent games, VAR that actually got things going. The match had started at a fast pace without too much happening, until the officials spotted some jostling between Haaland and Marc Cucurella. It looked like the both had as much a hold of each other, but the Chelsea defender hung on longer, resulting in a penalty. Haaland of course scored. Perhaps aggravated, it fired something in Chelsea. What followed was probably their best spell of football of the season. That was partly driven by Sterling’s best spell in a Chelsea shirt, but there was more to it. There was certainly so much to Palmer. It was like something finally clicked, with the attack rampant. Palmer was everywhere. The forward’s movement and touches were the perfect foil for Sterling’s running, which he often decorated with vintage tricks and nutmegs. Jeremy Doku, who could probably be described as Sterling’s long-term successor, was the victim of one flick through the legs. The pressure first told from a corner, with Thiago Silva plundering a fine equaliser with a guided header. Chelsea were at that point overrunning City, literally, which led to Reece James surging down the right to set up Sterling for a finish he would have relished. As good as Chelsea were, and as deserving as their lead was, they soon faced a dilemma. The issue with facing this City and getting the better of them is that you only have a certain amount of time until Guardiola figures it out and decisively changes it to reassert control. It felt like that had happened by the hour. City had already equalised before half-time through a brilliant Akanji header, capping a fine individual game. It could have been a lot worse for City had the centre-half not been so dominant, as Ruben Dias had an unusually erratic display. Akanji’s presence made it all the more surprising he was left unmarked. For the third goal, then, City just made their own space. Phil Foden paused on the ball to allow Julian Alvarez to burst from deep, the overlap then allowing Haaland to sneak in on the other side. It wasn’t the cleanest finish, but it was still artful forward play due to the quality of the run. VAR checked for half-time, but it would have been ludicrous to rule it out. Chelsea, for their part, kept persevering. This is where more encouragement could come from the display. They again gave Dias trouble, as the centre-half found himself caught out from a parried shot, allowing Jackson to equalise. Palmer was again making so much happen, enjoying the freedom that Pochettino affords him. If it feels remarkable that City let an academy player like that go, it only speaks to their strength in depth. The next goal suitably came from way back. Rodri took a shot from distance on 86 minutes, and the ball deflected into the net. There was still more in the game, though. Pochettino has instilled something in Chelsea. They kept going, and forced Dias into another rash moment. Palmer stepped up, You could have forgiven him for feeling some nerves. Ederson would have faced him a lot in training. Palmer made all that irrelevant, as he showed no nerves at all. It is obviously too early to say Chelsea are back. Palmer, however, is here. Read More Jamie Carragher bemused by penalty decision in Man City vs Chelsea: ‘It’s not right’ Five things we learned from Chelsea and Man City’s eight-goal thriller Chelsea’s downward spiral offers stark warning to Man City Jeremy Doku’s brilliance shows Man City’s edge and Chelsea’s key problem Chelsea will be fighting for titles sooner rather than later, says Pep Guardiola Chelsea vs Manchester City LIVE: Latest Premier League updates

Tyson Fury has sparked backlash from boxing fans after claiming that Francis Ngannou poses a tougher test than Oleksandr Usyk. Fury will box former UFC heavyweight champion Ngannou in Saudi Arabia on 28 October, after talks with Usyk collapsed earlier this year. A bout between WBC champion Fury and unified champion Usyk would have crowned the first undisputed heavyweight champion in more than 20 years. Instead, Usyk went on to beat mandatory challenger Daniel Dubois in August, ahead of Fury’s fight with Ngannou – in which the WBC belt is not on the line. Speaking to Fight Hub TV on Thursday, Fury said: “Has [undisputed] ever been my priority? Did I ever say I wanted undisputed? It’s always been some other b***h’s dream, hasn’t it? ‘Undisputed, road to undisputed’. “Listen, I’ve got Francis Ngannou to deal with. And should the other little sausage want to fight for undisputed, then if he takes a small percentage, we might make it happen. But if he wants a large bag, I’m gonna say: ‘No, thank you’.” Ukrainian Usyk accepted a purse split of 75-25 per cent in Fury’s favour, only for talks to fall apart due to negotiations around the purse split in the rematch clause. “I’ve not said anything, I’ve not even been out in public,” Fury said. “Have you heard anything from me at all? Since all of this, I’ve not said anything. “[The reports] are all untrue, because if you didn’t hear me say it, it’s not true. The truth of the matter was, him and his team were s***houses. They got offered the fight at Wembley, it didn’t happen, and then we moved on. That was it. “Now I’m fighting Francis Ngannou, who’s stepping up to the plate. And I think he’s gonna be a bit of a bigger, tougher challenge than these other guys. These other guys are just boxers; this guy’s more than that.” Fans took to the comment section to hit out at Fury, 35, for the latter claim. “Total joke,” wrote one user. “It’s almost like Fury is going out of his way to make boxing fans depressed. I still think Fury is an excellent boxer but I’ve also lost all respect for him now.” Another wrote, “Strip Tyson. WBC credibility almost gone,” while one said: “Fury is trying so hard to make it out like this event isn’t a complete embarrassment.” Another comment read: “What a disgrace to boxing! Usyk seeking to become undisputed while this clown is doing everything in his power to avoid him and keeping the last belt in his hands.” Click here to subscribe to The Independent’s Sport YouTube channel for all the latest sports videos. Read More Tyson Fury claims he would beat Francis Ngannou in MMA fight Watch moment topless Tyson Fury goads Francis Ngannou into taking his shirt off during press conference Why Fury vs Ngannou may tarnish the Gypsy King’s legacy forever Chris Eubank Jr’s coach remanded in custody following airport arrest Tyson Fury urged to highlight Saudi Arabia’s ‘disturbing’ human rights record Tyson Fury claims he would beat Francis Ngannou in MMA fight Former Tyson Fury opponent backs Francis Ngannou to drop ‘Gypsy King’

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