Slide 1: The Anti-SNARF Manifesto
Jonah Peretti The Anti-SNARF Manifesto Founder & CEO SNARF content is breaking the internet and frying our brains, here’s how BuzzFeed is fighting back. 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
Slide 2: The Rise of SNARF
The judgement 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
Slide 3: SNARF shapes society, culture and politics
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
Slide 4: Growing Discontent
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
Slide 5: Anti-trust and the addictive AI-powered platforms
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 a
Slide 6: Here is how we will do it….
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 r
Slide 7: Creators, IP and a new social media platform
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 t