In an open letter, CEO Jonah Peretti calls out TikTok and Meta for prioritizing AI tech over content and says people miss the mid-2010s "'beer and wine' era of the internet."
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti Photo by Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for BuzzFeed Inc.
BuzzFeed Inc. head Jonah Peretti says he wants to make the Internet fun again; and, after years of relying on social media companies to deliver his media empire’s content to audiences, BuzzFeed will do so by launching a new social media platform.
In a memo released today, Peretti called out TikTok and Meta, writing that respective CEOs Zhang Yiming and Mark Zuckerberg don’t “care very much about the content” instead being “much more interested in technology and AI.” Peretti assesses that companies prioritize the judgment of AIs over the tech company’s judgment of human employees.
He writes, “TikTok was successful launching in countries where the team building the apps did not even speak the local language or have any understanding of the content that was getting distributed. Meta employees who used to be involved in shaping content policy have effectively been replaced by AI, undermining their sense of purpose as human judgment becomes less important in designing these systems.”
In his memo, Peretti calls out social platforms for prioritizing what he describes as content with exaggerated stakes that manufacture anger and provoke fear, among other negative emotions, in order to retain user attention.
Peretti, who oversees a portfolio that includes BuzzFeed, film and TV production company BuzzFeed Studios, news organization HuffPost, and food-centric media outfit Tasty, announces that BuzzFeed would be launching a new social media platform with the goal “to spread joy and enable playful creative expression.” The announcement is very light on details but Peretti noted that the new platform will use “to give users agency instead of stealing their agency.” Interested parties are directed to a website with a cartoon island where emails and phone numbers can be input.
Bread & Circuses for the masses, from our very own Wikipedia:
NS Gemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude (German for 'Strength Through Joy'; KdF) was a German NSDAP-operated leisure organization in Nazi Germany.[1] It was part of the German Labour Front (German: Deutsche Arbeitsfront), the national labour organization at that time.
Set up in November 1933 as a tool to promote the advantages of Nazism to the German people and internationally, it was also used to ease the process of the rearmament of Germany. Through its structure of organized events and promotion of propaganda, it was also intended to prevent dissident and anti-state behavior. By 1939, it became the world's largest tourism operator.[2]
KdF was composed of several departments with their own specific goals, with each department organizing different leisure activities. It organized activities such as sporting events on factory floors, art exhibitions, discounted concerts and, most famously and popularly, subsidized holidays and cruise trips. One of its largest departments, although sometimes considered a separate organization altogether, was Beauty of Labour, which concerned itself with physical and sanitary improvements of the workplace. KdF was responsible for the improvement of several factories and sports facilities throughout its operations in the 1930s.
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