Journalist Ben Smith tells the story of how digital media organisations became addicted to "going viral" in his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.
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Smith is the editor in chief of Semafor, a new global news company and a former media columnist for The New York Times and was founding editor-in-chief of recently deceased digital news site BuzzFeed News, which along with HuffPost, Breitbart and Gawker Media represented a new world of online media in the early 2000s.
His book tells the inside story of how rivals Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media started the race for virility blamed for the rise of disinformation.
He told Kim Hill that around 2016 the tide turned for businesses such as BuzzFeed that were built to be native to the web and social media platforms when they started to be viewed by the public as "increasingly toxic".
There was a false nostalgia for 20th century media, he said.
Mainstream media had discredited itself with its audiences during the Iraq war and was technologically out of step with its audience at the point that sites like BuzzFeed came into play, he said.
"Of course the quest for audience, and often totally shameless and insane dystopian quest for audience, the internet didn't invent that. But in a way the old tabloid editors, the you know trashiest television producers, the most demagogic radio hosts, had in some ways been flying without instruments.
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"What the internet did was really turn those instruments on so that you could see clearly, with the lights on exactly who was reading you and why and at least feel the temptation to follow that traffic wherever it led."
Smith said the birth of the internet led to a type of utopianism that took different forms.
For example, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti had a false belief that social media "would be this incredibly positive new public space", while those at Gawker likely thought the internet would "rip away the hypocrisy of the mainstream media" and that there was something positive about exposing things for their own sake, Smith said.
Early in 2017 BuzzFeed decided to publish the Steele Dossier, which contained various lurid but unverified allegations about Donald Trump.
Smith said the document was circulating in Washington and was being discussed and "relied upon by journalists and intelligence agents and law enforcement officials, US senators, people like that".
Like other media organisations, BuzzFeed tried to get their reporters to stand up or knock down the allegations, he said.
Prominent figures in the US government such as John McCain were acting based on information in the document but it was difficult for media to explain issues such as why the US government thought Trump had been compromised by the Russians to the public given the document was still secret, Smith said.
"CNN [then] reported that there was this document, that everyone had seen it, it had been briefed to Barack Obama and Donald Trump that it had been produced by a credible former Western intelligence agent and that it said the president was compromised by the Russians."
Smith said in that situation it was not tenable to keep from people what was being talked about.
In retrospect, Smith said it was evident that people were not examining the claims in the Steele Dossier but rather saying "see this is the secret thing that proves what I think".
Facebook's decade of dominance
Facebook became the centre of a new predominantly right wing, very divisive political style of misinformation, Smith said.
The company found itself in a political debate from which it could not extricate itself without getting out of the news, politics and information business which it has since done, Smith said.
Facebook was not thinking about how to get people elected, he said.
"They were just thinking how to we keep you stuck on Facebook 30 seconds longer every day. And what they found was if content was very engaging, that's what would do it and so essentially that meant weighting toward content that had a lot of comments."
Facebook thought that meant people were having "engaged and thoughtful discussions", but in fact if someone posted a racist meme that created a reaction the system could also take it as good engagement and show it to everybody, he said.
How does building an audience differ from just getting traffic?
During the 2010s Facebook created something of a mono culture, Smith said.
"The game of getting traffic in the 2010s was very focused on mining Facebook, in particular, I think one of the strange things of this decade was the extent to which this one site, one platform Facebook swallowed everything else and became this kind of mono culture."
The game was to see how many Facebook views you could get and then to sell advertising adjacent to those views, he said.
That led to a homogenisation with every website looking and sounding the same, he said.
"Those of us who survived and came out of that era learnt a lot about how you develop a really distinct approach and speak to people who really like that and not try to be everything to everybody."
BuzzFeed built an enormous audience, but did not own its relationship to the audience and it worked at the whim of other platforms which made business decisions not to share the revenue, he said.
Twitter and Facebook dominated the social media landscape for a decade, he said.
"The notion that everybody in public life in any way has to be on the same platform all the time having the same conversation is something I think consumers got sick of."
Consumers have caught on to the fact that they are being manipulated by publishers using algorithms and are looking for different options, he said.
