Silicon Valley has become the epicentre of another verbal spat. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has launched a scathing attack on his rival Mark Zuckerberg over the latter’s company Meta’s use of artificial intelligence for content recommendation and moderation.
Peretti said Meta began using AI to compete with the rising prominence of ByteDance’s TikTok. “Similar to [ByteDance Founder] Zhang Yiming, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care very much about the content on his platforms and is much more interested in technology and AI,” Peretti said.
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He added that to achieve this goal, Meta had to rebuild their data centres by racking billions of dollars worth of GPUs. “But this shift also meant that employees working at Meta no longer knew why content was being recommended by their algorithms,” he said.
Is it time for ‘SNARF’?
Peretti coined a new term ‘SNARF’, which stands for Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear. “SNARF is the kind of content that evolved when a platform asks an AI to maximise usage…Millions of creators make SNARF content to stay in the feed and earn a living,” Peretti explained.
Since every piece of content competes with one another, only SNARF has the ability to be successful, “even if it is inaccurate, hateful, fake, ethically dubious, and intellectually suspect”, Peretti added.
“It is not a coincidence that no matter what the message is, it always takes the same form, namely memetically optimized media that maximizes stakes and novelty, provokes anger, drives retention, and instills fear,” he wrote.
Peretti attacks Trump too
The BuzzFeed Founder went on to point his criticism at US President Donald Trump, who he called “a MAGA President that spews SNARF”. He went on to claim that Trump used SNARF to win the recently-concluded US Presidential elections and since then, there has been tremendous pressure for all platform to allow free flow of SNARF content.
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“Every major platform is capitulating to Trump, saying they will end “censorship” which is an euphemistic way of saying they will let politically charged bullshit and conspiracy theories run wild on their platforms,” he said.
I will fight back: Peretti
Claiming to care about internet content, Peretti said he will fight back against SNARF and bring “some joy and fun back to the internet”. “People are craving the ‘beer and wine’ era of the internet and we can bring that back on BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Tasty,” Peretti said.
And how will he do it? Peretti claimed that his platform BuzzFeed will provide human curation of the best of the internet, providing an alternative to algorithmically recommended SNARF. “We will also counter anger and fear with a sense of humour, laughing at the buffoonery and ridiculousness of the most powerful people,” he said.
HuffPost will break through by focusing on topics where the stake are legitimate, novelty is reala nd fear and anger are justified. “HuffPost will continue to counter-program with Life, Voices and Personal stories where the journalism provides an escape from SNARF,” Peretti added.
Tasty provides an alternative to a sea of terrible engagement bait food content, that manipulates the audience into watching disgusting and pointless videos. Peretti said Tasty will integrate capabilities like AI recipe mixing, community tips and challenges and creator-led content.
“BuzzFeed Studios will escape SNARF by creating well-developed, quality longform video and premium content that is distributed on streamers and platforms that do care about what they air,” he explained.
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