BuzzFeed's AI-Powered Social Media Platform: A New Approach to Digital Interaction

4 reasons why BuzzFeed Island might not save social media

Social media is in a malaise - at least if you believe social media. Instagram and Threads are full of people complaining about the platforms' algorithms, and X... well, it's better not to look if you want to maintain the will to live. Several platforms have sprung up hoping to offer an alternative. There's open network Bluesky, which is giving old Twitter vibes right down the colour palette and winged logo, and there's anti-AI Cara for artists. Some unexpected players are appearing too. The web design platform Squarespace has launched Cosmos, which it describes as Pinterest for creative inspiration (Pinterest, then). Now BuzzFeed is joining the party. Yes, that BuzzFeed: the media site responsible for articles like 'Your Soulmate's First Name Initial Can Be Revealed By Choosing Your Favourite Dish From This List' and 'Believe It Or Not, There's A Crumbl Cookie That Perfectly Describes Your Love Life - We'll Tell You What It Is If You Take This Quiz'. BuzzFeed says it's creating a new "AI-driven platform built for creativity and joy, not manipulation or addiction". Apparently called BF Island, the platform will encourage creators to make authentic content for its own worth, not for clicks or the whims of an algorithm. Founder and CEO Jonah Peretti announced the plans in a 3,000-word manifesto, in which he defenestrates Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook/Instagram) and ByteDance (TikTok) founder Zhang Yiming for their irresponsible attitudes towards content and for putting curation in the hands of AI. Jonah says today's social media has become overun by SNARF (stakes, novelty, anger, retention and fear), techniques creators have learned to use to take advantage of algorithms. "If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today's internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart," he says. His analysis is spot on. What I'm less convinced about is whether BuzzFeed is going to be the one to fix it. We're told that BuzzFeed Island is "built with user agency, creativity, and joy at its core" to offer an "oasis from algorithm-driven doomscrolling". There will be "quirky, weird, and joyful experiences to make the internet fun again" along with a focus on interactive storytelling, new content formats and "cutting-edge AI tools to power self-expression, connection and creative exploration". So far, so... vague. Don't get me wrong; I'm all for an alternative social media platform, and it's not even clear yet if BuzzFeed Island will be image/video-based or text-based. But, in true BuzzFeed style, let's just list some of the reasons why BF Island may not be the saviour of the social web. Call me a cynic, but I'm guessing that, like when Elon Musk claimed to have bought Twitter for the good of humanity, BuzzFeed's motivation may not be entirely altruistic. It will be at least partly motivated by a problem all traditional online media is struggling with: social platforms aren't giving us much traffic anymore. BuzzFeed would have an obvious self-interest in promoting content from its own sites, and from other companies it owns like HuffPost, Tasty and BuzzFeed Studios. Will it really bring back the social part of social media? 2) Despite its insistence that it definitely does not do clickbait, BuzzFeed became synonymous with viral content and a style of headline writing that makes articles impossible not to click even if you know they're going to waste your time (and yes, we all had to follow its lead). Want to learn 487 Random Mind-blowing Facts That Will Change Your Life or discover what My Little Pony you are? BuzzFeed is your fix. But many of the contributors who write those BuzzFeed quizzes and lists aren't paid, or not until their post has reached many thousands of views. Has BF realised that going full social media means more free content and less work curating it? In any case, the track record doesn't inspire confidence that it won't design a platform as addictive as the ones we already have. Have they not clocked that this isn't a selling point? AI features are one of the reasons people have been leaving other platforms. Jonah's manifesto lambasts how TikTok and Instagram have allowed AI to take advantage of our most predictable behaviours to make social media more addictive, but he doesn't give any insight into how BuzzFeed's implementation would be better. And any use of AI is going to make people wonder if their content is being scraped for something else. There aren't many specifics in the announcement, so it remains to be seen if BuzzFeed will address any of the most common gripes with social media. Will it give users more control over the content they see and show them more content from the people they follow? Will it do a better job of removing bots, spam and fake news? Will it have fewer ads ad and more authentic content? If you want to be one of the first to find out, you can sign up to request to join the private beta at www.buzzfeed.com/bfisland. In the meantime, I'm off to learn Which Sabrina Carpenter Song Perfectly Fits My Vibe Based On My Fork Preferences (and you thought our headlines were cringe).

BuzzFeed Is Launching a New Social Media Network. Why?

We got an inside look at the A.I.-fueled future of the once culture-defining quiz site. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. BuzzFeed, the defining American digital media empire of the Obama years, now stands as an unrecognizable, rotted husk of its former self. In the decade that has passed since the peak of its influence, the iconic company has laid off thousands of staffers, shuttered its News division, undergone a disastrous SPAC-fueled public offering, acquired competitors like Complex and HuffPost only to strip them for parts, and shed all the kingmaking clout that allowed it to catapult myriad reporters, comedians, podcasters, and dresses to durable fame. The story of BuzzFeed's decline is, in many ways, the story of social media's vibe shift. Facebook was resplendent with the website's listicle clickbait and recipe videos before the platform pivoted away from news and toward virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Twitter, once the reporters' watercooler and the social justice movement's bullhorn, lost all its reliability and journalistic prowess after Elon Musk's takeover. Upstart communities, like Bluesky and Threads, that have arisen to fill in the Facebook/Twitter niche are still finding their footing and building their audiences, lacking the monocultural critical mass that might allow a BuzzFeed-like publication to ride engagement algorithms to virality. And today's most vibrant platforms -- namely, Instagram and TikTok and YouTube -- are driven by visuals and built to keep your attention locked into their smartphone-optimized feeds at all times, instead of following links to the broader internet. So what should BuzzFeed do to regain its onetime foothold in internet culture? Start its own social network, of course. Such a prospect was teased earlier this month, after Semafor -- the scoopy news site run by former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief Ben Smith -- got hold of a leaked Slack message from BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti. "It's clear we can't rely on the platforms to create a positive environment for content creators like us. I'm beginning to think we need to create our own social media platform," Peretti wrote, alluding to the conservative drift of social media pioneers like Mark Zuckerberg. "Big role for us to play as the underdog publisher keeping truth and joy alive, especially for women who are left out of this vibe shift to 'masculine energy' from Trump, Musk, Zuck, Rogan, et al." It appears Peretti is following through. Slate recently received a five-page memo from Peretti that lays out concepts of a plan for BuzzFeed's post-Big Tech future, including "a new social media platform built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression." The new platform also plans to "use AI to give users agency instead of stealing their agency," per the memo. "I am very excited, after years of being beholden to other platforms, to take the big step of making our own," Peretti writes. This new platform is still in the developmental stages and doesn't yet have an official name. Its core concept and imagery revolve around that of an island that will serve as a port in a storm, per a background briefing. The plan is to craft something "safe and fun" that will "bring joy" to its users, especially "women and gay people," at a time when other social media executives are aping norms of reactionary ultramasculinity. There will be no algorithms tuned and incentivized for maximum engagement. Rather, the A.I. baked into the platform will be deployed for generative and creative purposes, as engines for games and -- yes -- those quizzes you know, love, and mock. The goal is not to try to rival the A.I. trenches of Instagram but to replicate something more like the personal-interest hangout boards of Pinterest (minus the alleged workplace toxicity and community harassment, hopefully). Built to serve as "an oasis from algorithm-driven doomscrolling," per a press release, the platform, called Island, will "bring together the best of BuzzFeed's recent innovations, with a focus on interactive storytelling, new content formats, and cutting-edge AI tools to power self-expression, connection and creative exploration." Yes, it's a little vague. While it will eventually operate apart from the core BuzzFeed website, it will be powered by the company's in-house devs and subsidized by profits from the overall BuzzFeed Inc. business -- which, according to the briefing, is "pretty much right-sized" and "profitable" in the wake of a round of deep layoffs at HuffPost and the sell-off of First We Feast, the formerly Complex-owned studio that produces the wildly popular interview show Hot Ones. There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical. Peretti rails in his memo against the Big Tech execs who "sit next to the President during the inauguration ceremonies" and "take zero responsibility for the media ecosystem that they were instrumental in creating." But HuffPost staffers have pointed out that the recent cuts targeted editorial teams -- culture, politics, climate change -- that were instrumental in breaking stories and driving traffic to the site. "The shocking scale of this week's announce layoffs do not match the financial information we have," the national editor wrote in an X post that also pointed to the potential influence of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump loyalist who owns about 8 percent of the company's shares but doesn't hold much voting power. The vision for Island is somewhat reminiscent of the aims that Ramaswamy expressed in an interview last summer with Smith -- that "the internet deserves a sanctuary, a place where people feel joy, rather than toxicity, and have fun in an unconstrained and unifying way." That, along with a helping of "cost cuts." The overall mission Peretti espouses in his memo also runs up against some striking self-contradictions. As he lays it out, the Island is a response to a nightmare present in which "our meaning, purpose, and agency has already been undermined by Artificial Intelligence technologies," a trend he blames on the success of TikTok's deep-learning recommendation feeds and Facebook/Meta's subsequent bid to play catchup. "When an app company doesn't care about content and asks an AI to maximize usage the result is a service that incentivizes content that maximizes addictiveness," he writes (emphasis his). "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." Peretti boils this tendency down to the acronym SNARF, which stands for "Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear." "Content creators exaggerate stakes to make their content urgent and existential," he writes. "They manufacture novelty. ... 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." All well and good and fair enough, but it's bizarre for Peretti to ascribe this trend to the emergence of TikTok and black-box feeds when users have bemoaned the prevalence of platform-incentivized outrage since the days of Usenet. You could even point, preinternet, to the viewership incentives that inspired local TV stations to constantly play up racist "crime" reports or the audiences that old-time radio stations curried by granting microphones to antisemitic rabble-rousers. Heck, you could just look to the hate-filled outlets that also successfully gamed Facebook's algorithms throughout the 2010s, even prior to Trump's election and the investments in deep-learning tech. Peretti's truncated history is somewhat convenient; there's not a single mention of the effects of YouTube, another quasi-social network key to BuzzFeed's former success. But it allows him room to weave a tale of how early Trump-era A.I. got Both Sides™all riled up due to "competition from TikTok." In this view, "MAGA and 'woke' are the same thing!" Peretti explains further: "This is why it seems like every election, every new technology, every global conflict has the potential to end our way of life, destroy democracy, or set off a global apocalypse!" How do MAGA and "woke" both take a hatchet to polite society? "They've already delivered a MAGA President that spews SNARF and a woke counter-culture that celebrates the assassination of a health insurance executive." (No one remind Peretti that the sympathy with Luigi Mangione crossed ideological lines.) Leaving aside the irony of Peretti himself using this memo to blame a new technology for ruining things, there's not much here that's all too insightful or original. The whole screed reads like a lament of enshittification, without using the term or even nodding to Cory Doctorow's theories. He compares the "early internet," an era of "beer and wine," to "today's internet," which "is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart." This is cribbing terminology right from Trumpy conservatives like current FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, ex-Rep. Mike Gallagher, and writer Niall Ferguson, all of whom deployed the "digital fentanyl" metaphor in service of the anti-China fearmongering that eventually pushed Congress to ban TikTok altogether. (Yes, that law is still on the books and in effect, in limbo though its enforcement may be.) But most puzzling of all is how Peretti is approaching A.I., having spent the past two years gushing about generative tools and framing every major BuzzFeed business decision as an opportunity to incorporate more A.I. The CEO may rage at Facebook now, but he wasn't averse to taking $10 million from Meta in early 2023 to generate A.I. content for Facebook and Instagram. His 2024 letter to the shareholders touted A.I.-written quizzes, listicles of generated Barbie Dreamhouses, and a "contest" for users to write prompts of their desired A.I. emoji. At the end of the day, Jonah Peretti wants you to play with his A.I. instead of the other guy's A.I., because this A.I. is nice and inoffensive. (Despite the promises from last year to "build the defining media company for the AI era," the company's stock value continues to hover around single-digit lows.) The means by which to achieve these ambitious goals remain as opaque as ever. When it comes to the last remaining assets of the BuzzFeed portfolio -- the namesake site and its Studios portfolio, the increasingly shredded HuffPost, and Tasty, with its "A.I. Chefbot Botatouille" -- the thought is to "counter SNARF" by just making spaces for human beings to distract themselves by playing with A.I., even as American democracy does in fact crumble all around us. That gets a big ol' WTF from me.

BuzzFeed's New Plan: An AI-Powered Social Media Platform to Help "Spread Joy"

Ira Sachs Sundance Movie 'Peter Hujar's Day' Nabbed by Sideshow, Janus 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. The announcement of the new social media platform comes after a year that saw BuzzFeed shed assets. In Feb 2024, the company sold its Complex division to the livestream shopping platform NTWRK in a $109 million deal. In December, Buzzfeed unloaded Hot Ones outfit First We Feast, which sold off to a group of investors that included Crooked Media and the Sorors Fund Management, all led by founder Chris Schonberger and host Sean Evans. In his memo, Peretti writes, "I am very excited, after years of being beholden to other platforms, to take the big step of making our own." Most anxieties about the future are really about the present. We worry about a future where AI takes away our human agency, devalues our labor, and creates social discord. But that world is already here and our meaning, purpose, and agency has already been undermined by Artificial Intelligence technologies. In the US, this began with the launch of TikTok. In 2017, I met with ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming before he created TikTok. He explained to me that he wanted to launch an app in the US, but he needed a source of video content. I asked what kind of content and he said it didn't matter, he just needed tens of thousands of videos each day. He explained that Chinese universities produce more Deep Learning PhDs each year than the total number employed in every Silicon Valley company combined. He explained that this talent allowed him to make his AI so good that the content didn't matter. He just needed raw tonnage of content so the AI could create a personalized experience and get the flywheel going. He subsequently bought Musical.ly, evolved it into TikTok by adding advanced AI, and the rest is history. Similar to Zhang Yiming, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care very much about the content on his platforms and is much more interested in technology and AI. As TikTok exploded in popularity, Meta did everything it could to achieve parity with ByteDance. They went all in on the same kind of deep learning AI that powers TikTok. Meta had to rebuild their data centers by racking billions of dollars worth of GPUs, years before the current Gen AI mania. These efforts have gotten Meta very close to parity with ByteDance and successfully slowed the growth of TikTok. But this shift also meant that employees working at Meta no longer knew why content was being recommended by their algorithms. The deep learning approach leveraging massively parallel computation made the metrics go up, but the teams at Meta didn't know why one piece of content was winning over another because the decisions were being made inside the deep learning black box. The judgment of the deep learning AIs became more important than the judgement of employees working at these tech companies. 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 judgement becomes less important in designing these systems. More recently, Zuckerberg has said he will start using AI agents as "mid-level engineers." Having a job at Meta is beginning to feel like being a UBI recipient, where you are lucky to be a citizen that gets some trickle down compensation from the value-creating AIs. But the bigger loss of human agency comes from the billions of people that use these apps. These deep learning AIs are designed to maximize the time we all spend on these apps. While you are reading this memo, you are probably jonesing to switch over to Instagram or TikTok. It turns out when an app company doesn't care about content and asks an AI to maximize usage the result is a service that incentivizes content that maximizes addictiveness. 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 Rise of SNARF SNARF stands for Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear. SNARF is the kind of content that evolves when a platform asks an AI to maximize usage. Content creators need to please the AI algorithms or they become irrelevant. Millions of creators make SNARF content to stay in the feed and earn a living. We are all familiar with this kind of content, especially those of us who are chronically online. 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. Every piece of content faces ruthless Darwinian competition so only SNARF has the ability to be successful, even if it is inaccurate, hateful, fake, ethically dubious, and intellectually suspect. This dynamic is causing many different types of content to evolve into versions of the same thing. Once you understand this you can see how much of our society, culture, and politics are downstream from big tech's global SNARF machines. The political ideas that break through, from both Democrats and Republicans, need to be shaped into SNARF to spread. 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. The news stories and journalism that break through aren't the most important stories, but rather the stories that can be shaped into SNARF. This is why it seems like every election, every new technology, every global conflict has the potential to end our way of life, destroy democracy, or set off a global apocalypse! 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. The result is an endless stream of addictive content that leaves everyone feeling depressed, scared, and dissatisfied. Back in 2018, I explained this dynamic to Facebook's head of NewsFeed, warning him that when BuzzFeed creates "meaningful content, it doesn't get rewarded...the content that is working isn't our best content" and I explained that the "entire digital media industry is faced with this dilemma. Do you make negative and polarizing content to win on Facebook? Or do you make positive social content and see your business and traffic decline?" Leaked quotes from my email were read before Congress by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, but the problem got worse, not better. As I explained earlier, competition from TikTok made all the major US social platforms double down on SNARF. It was hard for platforms to resist because SNARF is highly addictive and makes engagement metrics and revenue go up. Addictive behavior is the most predictable type of consumer behavior and the easiest to exploit for profits. Meta has more than quadrupled its market capitalization since I sent my warning in 2018 and is now worth over $1.7 trillion. I'm sure Zuckerberg is happy he didn't take my advice. And now that Trump is in power, a candidate who masterfully used SNARF to win the election, there is tremendous pressure for all platforms to allow the free flow of SNARF content. 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. For the foreseeable future, SNARF will continue to be the most ubiquitous form of media, shaping the way business, politics, and media work. Growing Discontent But there is some hope, despite the growing revenue and usage of the big social media platforms. We are beginning to see the first cracks that suggest there might be an opportunity to fight back. A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the majority of respondents would prefer to live in a world where TikTok and Instagram did not exist! There was generally a feeling of being compelled to use these projects because of FOMO, social pressure, and addiction. A large portion of users said they would pay money for TikTok and Instagram to not exist, suggesting these products have negative utility for many people. This challenges traditional economics which posits that consumers choosing a product means it provides positive utility. Instead, social media companies are using AI to manipulate consumer behavior for their own ends, not the benefit of the consumer. This aligns with what these researchers suspect is happening, namely that "companies introduce features that exacerbate non-user utility and diminish consumer welfare, rather than enhance it, increasing people's need for a product without increasing the utility it delivers to them." AI undermining human agency is breaking classical economic theories and also undermining the established theories about the tech industry and competition. Leading analysts like Ben Thompson have missed this major shift and continue to argue that the big tech companies are consumer friendly and winning market share by delivering utility to customers. In his view, the social media companies are "aggregators" that provide a phenomenal benefit to consumers by providing a product they love at zero cost. He claims that this consumer-centricity is why most anti-trust efforts are misguided. But he is missing that this was only true in the early years before the platforms used more advanced AI to maximize the addictiveness of their services. If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today's internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn't winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear. Any theory of business competition needs to be updated with deeper analysis drawn from addiction psychology and behavioral economics. People haven't realized it yet, but the AI-powered platforms have already shipped the dystopian AI future many people are worried might come in the future. They've already 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! They've already delivered an information ecosystem where you can't get basic information in a crisis like the recent LA fires, but instead get endless fights about identity politics, fake images, and conspiracy theories. It is hilarious to me that so many people still blame "The Media" when the behaviors of the media are largely shaped by the much larger tech platforms, who distribute most of the world's content, despite being mostly disinterested in the content itself. These tech companies are worth literally trillions of dollars, control the flow of information, and sit next to the President during the inauguration ceremonies. Nevertheless, they love to blame the media and take zero responsibility for the media ecosystem that they were instrumental in creating, almost by accident as a byproduct of the AI wars. But the public is beginning to catch on. Everyone is beginning to realize that the system is broken. People are beginning to crave something different. Time To Fight Back Unlike the platforms, we care about internet content and know that it moves culture and the world forward. We have an opportunity to 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. We can make content that gives you a little buzz, helps you relax, have a good time, and connect with your friends. But we can't be naive about how hard it is to sell beer when your competitors are offering hard drugs free of charge. We need to be maniacal about packaging our content so it can compete in the social media feeds against SNARF. We need to select stories where the stakes and novelty are actually high, and not fake it. We need to cover stories where anger and fear are justified, but also balance it with joy and entertainment, and prove that positive and truthful content can also perform if we give it the right care and attention. We need to tell great stories that keep people engaged, without annoying retention hacks, but still be savvy about what makes people want to stay until the end. Put simply, we need to inject some truth, joy, creativity, and positive entertainment into the social web so people have better alternatives in the sea of SNARF. Here is how we will do it.... BuzzFeed will provide human curation of the best of the internet, providing an alternative to algorithmically recommended SNARF. We do the doomscrolling for you, so you can follow the biggest trends, find the hidden gems, and be in the loop without wasting your time and risking your mental health. We will also counter the anger and fear with a sense of humor, laughing at the buffoonery and ridiculousness of the most powerful people. We will counter the increase of gaslighting and misinformation by speaking to our diverse audience in ways that other institutions, media, and platforms clearly won't, and no matter the external pressures, we will ensure that our community's joy and humanity are preserved and celebrated. SNARF drives engagement, but if we do our job we can still break through with humor, with joy, and with a small dose of righteous anger. And we will bring more fun and playfulness back to the internet with low stakes content that is pure entertainment, from celebrity stories to shopping to personal advice. HuffPost will break through by zeroing in on topics where the stakes are legitimate, the novelty is real, and the fear and anger are justified, and we won't be above using clever retention tactics, all while maintaining high journalistic standards. You might call this using "SNARF for good," but we need to be savvy about how to spread our important work in a tough information environment. Audiences are getting more sensitive to content that fakes the stakes, manufactures novelty, and manipulates emotions for engagement, and HuffPost can stand out by telling it like it is and having higher standards. At a time when establishment, billionaire-owned publications are succumbing to power and softening their coverage, HuffPost will be loud, direct and honest. And HuffPost will continue to counter-program with Life, Voices and Personal stories where the journalism provides an escape from SNARF, because living a good, joyful life means taking breaks from politics, culture wars, and existential fights about the future of society. Tasty will fight SNARF with utility and social connection, as the leading food entertainment brand, on the forefront of food trends, bringing audiences entertaining formats with beloved creators and famous faces. Tasty provides an alternative to a sea of terrible engagement bait food content, that manipulates the audience into watching disgusting and pointless videos. The Tasty brand is trusted, our creators are beloved, and our scale is massive, across audiences both young and old, so we are a rare food brand that can still attract an audience without resorting to toxic engagement bait tactics. And 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. 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. In only a few years, we've released 19 original movies and TV shows, and countless digital series that have driven billions of views and entertained global audiences across genres. We will continue to produce beloved video formats, TV series, docs, films and podcasts, and offer opportunities for creators and talent to create with us. Our audience-first approach to development allows us to create IP that can stand on its own, and transcend any deep learning algorithm. We know we are swimming against the tide, the platforms don't care or understand content, and they have all surrendered to a depressing form of AI-powered recommendation that gives SNARF a structural advantage. But I know we can still have success, and look forward to counter-programming with our human creativity fighting against the machine. The tide is starting to shift and we will benefit from the growing dissatisfaction with the big platforms. Before I go, I want to tell you about something big we are starting to build. We are creating a new social media platform built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression. This social media platform will use AI to give users agency instead of stealing their agency. 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! I can't share much more yet, but I am very excited, after years of being beholden to other platforms, to take the big step of making our own.