On Tuesday, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced his company will be launching its own social media platform, news he buried at the end of a long, tone-deaf manifesto about how AI and big tech are ruining what it means to be online. This is, to Peretti’s credit, true, but if you’re worried his solution will be to stem the onslaught of journalistic job losses or fight back against the AI companies that want to fill the internet with even more crap, don’t be: he’s not doing any of that.
The manifesto is called “The Anti-SNARF Manifesto,” which is not a reference to ThunderCats but instead a clumsy acronym for “Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear,” which Peretti believes drives the current algorithmically-based news and social media ecosystems. He writes that
The type of content that gets created and recommended is not the best content, but the content that elicits the most compulsive and predictable response from the human brain. When the platforms don’t care about content and ask the AI to maximize usage, the content evolves into what I call ‘SNARF.’
The manifesto takes aim at TikTok and Meta for focusing on technology and algorithms instead of quality content, claiming that these algorithms then lead to situations in which (emphasis his)
Content creators exaggerate stakes to make their content urgent and existential. They manufacture novelty and spin their content as unprecedented and unique. They manipulate anger to drive engagement via outrage. They hack retention by withholding information and promising a payoff at the end of a video. And they provoke fear to make people focus with urgency on their content.
Peretti believes that “Through this lens, MAGA and ‘woke’ are the same thing! They both are versions of political ideas that spread through raw negative emotion, outrage, and novelty.” He writes that “the AI-powered platforms have... delivered a MAGA President that spews SNARF and a woke counter-culture that celebrates the assassination of a health insurance executive — big stakes, lots of novelty, and plenty of anger, retention, and fear!”
I don’t think Peretti is wrong about content that obscures facts or leans into anger to drive clicks. In contrast, here’s a sample of current Buzzfeed headlines: “57 Hilariously Unfortunate People You'll Probably Feel A Little Bad Laughing At,” “21 Political Tweets From Last Week That Made Me Look Up At The Sky And Yell, ‘OMFG, YES’," and “These 25 Male Celebs Were Huge Heartthrobs In The '70s — But I'll Be Shocked If Literally Anyone Under 35 Can Name Them Now," Buzzfeed claimed in 2014 that it “doesn’t do clickbait,” and by its own definition, I’d agree: You know exactly what you’re getting with these articles, and they even tell you how you’re going to feel about them. (You could call this, as Peretti chides SNARF for above, a “predictable response,” but anyway!) All of it is designed for social sharing and compulsive engagement based on a particular kind of brainrot that Buzzfeed pioneered to great success, one of value-neutral controversy and stripped-down utility.
Buzzfeed was at the forefront of viral content, arguably a precursor to the very “SNARF” Peretti rails against. The spread of that content took a hit from changing social media algorithms alongside every other outlet; in the years since, Buzzfeed has struggled to regain its footing, so perhaps it’s no wonder Peretti spends so long being pissed off at social platforms. But Buzzfeed can’t compete not just because the internet doesn’t work like it did in the company’s heyday, but because the articles on Buzzfeed’s page aren’t about anything. Peretti uses the changing nature of virality to conflate Trump’s rhetoric with the widespread response to Luigi Mangione; he seems to believe these things go wide primarily because they upset people, and he doesn’t explore much difference in why people are upset. But in pointing out the real ways our emotions get manipulated on the internet, Peretti also seems to take aim at any kind of content that elicits real emotions. He’s not wrong that it’s less fun to disagree about health care and human rights than it is what color a dress is or which Golden Girl you are. But it takes a particular kind of Rich Guy Brain to spin that out into the idea that both sides are equally bad because, as he writes, “the result is an endless stream of addictive content that leaves everyone feeling depressed, scared, and dissatisfied.” People are, in fact, legitimately depressed, scared, and dissatisfied, and while I agree that plenty of news outlets and content creators lean into that to drive hollow engagement, Peretti’s view seems to fundamentally disbelieve that people earnestly want to care about real things.
Peretti putting the onus for some of this on AI is laughable when his own company has axed its Pulitzer Prize-winning news desk and conducted mass layoffs, leaning its full weight into AI and content creators instead. If it’s algorithms over people that’s driving all this, wouldn’t the smart alternative be thoughtful content created by real people; i.e., hiring journalists? If the AI-driven social media platforms are the problem, why would the solution be for Peretti to create his own social media platform “built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression”? Peretti writes that “this social media platform will use AI to give users agency instead of stealing their agency,” whatever that means technologically, and whatever “agency” looks like when held up against a platform whose defining feature seems to be “good vibes only.”
In the course of the manifesto, Peretti does remember that he also owns the remains of some outlets. He lays out his plans for them: Buzzfeed proper “will bring more fun and playfulness back to the internet with low stakes content that is pure entertainment” and also, somehow, “counter the increase of gaslighting and misinformation by speaking to our diverse audience in ways that other institutions, media, and platforms clearly won’t.” The reporters left at HuffPost (who are now surrounded by the worst people you know in the news desks at the Pentagon) will be “using ‘SNARF for good’” by writing, well, news. Food brand Tasty, once my favorite hate read, “will fight SNARF with utility and social connection… the Tasty app will give us our own platform to grow usage and loyalty by integrating capabilities such as AI recipe remixing, community tips and challenges, and creator-led content.”
Peretti can’t even make it through a paragraph about his own outlets before pivoting back into celebrating the very problems he rails against, an AI-driven tech platform that incentivizes creators. The main difference seems to be not just that it’s, you know, nice stuff, but that it’s his nice stuff. “I’m fed up with giving the platform companies advice about how to fix the internet, if we want this done right, we have to do it ourselves!” he writes. This is a man who claims to both “look forward to counter-programming with our human creativity fighting against the machine,” and a man who in December sold Hot Ones, a wildly popular interview food show that sounds exactly like what Peretti seems to think the internet needs, except that it is made by and for actual humans, and as such cannot be turned into a tech product.
Buzzfeed has looked everywhere for relevance except in hiring real human people to make good work for other humans to read. But “hire reporters” doesn’t boost a company’s stock valuation or give it a tech product to tote around for investment. Peretti is trying to solve the problems he identifies with the same problems, just with his own bright yellow “LOL” badge slapped over them. I look forward to whatever “listicles, but it’s a social media network” turns out to be.
