How Early Digital Media Led to Trump and Alt-Right

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, the social media news revolution appears to be coming to an end. BuzzFeed News, one of the first to harness social media’s influence is shutting down. While Vice Media are also reporting — reportedly for bankruptcy. Ben Smith was the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and he explores this crisis in his new book, and he’s joining Walter Isaacson to discuss what the past decade of digital news has shown us.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And, Ben Smith, welcome to the show.

BEN SMITH, AUTHOR, “TRAFFIC”: Thanks so much for having me.

ISAACSON: So, your great book, “Traffic,” coming out this week is all about BuzzFeed, Gawker, that era of the internet where everybody was chasing traffic. It kind of feels like in the past few months that era may be ending, that BuzzFeed News, for example, which you were part of, has closed down. Tell me, is this the end of an era and what do you think about what’s happening now?

SMITH: Yes. I mean, I think this era that was defined by social media in the 2010s, which is really what the book is about, you know, it felt — I would say, you know, when Joe Biden got elected, in a way, to me, that was a sign that people were tired of all the drama and the conflict that was, to me, defining that era. But I do think in the last — really the last few weeks it has felt really, like, OK this is drawing to a close and it’s time to figure out what is next.

ISAACSON: You helped found BuzzFeed News, the news division. What happened? Why did BuzzFeed News close?

SMITH: I mean, you know, there are a lot of reasons. And it’s something I’m really heartsick about. The reason was that, you know, our goal was to build kind of a new news channel for the social web. We imagine that these new platforms like Facebook and Twitter, they were the new cable. And in the way that CNN had built itself on this new pipe called cable, we would that on these social media platforms. These platforms, I don’t think are proving enduring the way cable did. The whole era is changing and ending and people — consumers are moving away from them. And so, I think the biggest — you know, the biggest problem was just that we were building for an age that never really arrived or that came and went. But we also never — you know, there were — there was — media companies imagine that they would be the ones who made money off of this, ultimately, Facebook and Twitter. You know, Facebook in particular, you know, was the only company that got really rich off Facebook.

ISAACSON: Well, you talk in your book about Jonah Peretti, who you worked with, a wonderful guy who starts BuzzFeed. His rivalry with Nick Denton, who starts Gawker, tell me about the two of them and their personalities seem so different when you read the book.

SMITH: Yes. You know, so when I went back to try to figure out like what’s the origin moment of this whole era, it did seem to me that it was in this downtown media scene in Manhattan in the early 2000s. And with these — among others, these two guys, one of whom had this very basically optimistic positive view of a kind of internet that would, you know, ultimately produce Barack Obama, among other things.

ISAACSON: And that’s Jonah Peretti?

SMITH: And that’s Jonah Peretti who started BuzzFeed. And the idea was, well, you know what, the kinds of things people are going to share on Facebook are ultimately would be more positive, more constructive than the old media. And this — and Nick Denton, his rival, who’s founded Gawker, whose basic premise was this new internet journalism is going to allow people to express the things they wouldn’t express before, not the kind of polite old truisms of old media, but the kind of real things that journalist would say to each other in bars, and by the way, the things that people would be too embarrassed to buy at the newsstand but could — but really the kind of like (INAUDIBLE) and the gossip and the pornography that they really wanted.

ISAACSON: What was Jonah’s insight about going viral? Because that seems to be the core insight that drives this decade?

SMITH: Yes. I mean, it was — the core insight was that where media had been distributed through cables, through newspaper printing presses, through broadcast towers, it was moving to being distributed, essentially hand-to-hand on the internet, that we were our own distributors, and that the content that the media companies that would succeed were the ones that produce things that people wanted to share with each other. And that was really the core insight. It’s pretty — you know, it’s an insight that is neutral to what that content is. That can be pictures of kittens, that can be antisemitic propaganda, as we learned, right?

ISAACSON: But wait. Didn’t really turn out to be neutral or did it add just into, as Steve Bannon says in your book, more enragement, more engagement?

SMITH: Yes. Well, it edged in a lot of different ways, and I think it began actually with a lot of very sweet, harmless stuff mostly. And by the mid-2010s, partly because of the systems, the platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have themselves set up, and the rules of the game as they had written them. The — what was most successful was the most, yes, “engaging thing.” And by engaging, it tended to mean, I say something unbelievably insulting to you, you replied it by telling me to kill myself. And then, we have a 15, you know, comment exchange, and the platform, says, fabulous, these people are engaged.

ISAACSON: Is that inevitable that the algorithms you talk about in social media had to inflame us and enrage us and engage us or could the algorithms had been written in a way that Jonah Peretti would have wanted, which is to connect us and make us feel better about ourselves?

SMITH: I don’t think these were inevitable. I think there were technical choices. But they also certainly — you know, elements of human nature are not avoidable. And I think the — you know, and I do think that some of us — some of Jonah, but I think me, like a lot of people in the early days of the internet imagined, you know, that people are basically better than they are, that people would never go out and publicly say the sorts of things that you see every second on the internet.

ISAACSON: The relationship between BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed News, and Facebook, and Jonah, Mark — Jonah Peretti and Mark Zuckerberg, seem to drive this book. Tell me about how Facebook’s decision affected the decade?

SMITH: Yes. I mean, Facebook’s, you know, engineers were making — were trying to figure out, how do we get people to use our platform and click on ads on our platform and come to something called newsfeed, that’s all these mixed-up interesting stuffs that, you know, baby pictures and hard news stories and everything and funny memes? And for a while that felt kind of delightful to consumers. And as it started to bleed into very, very controversial difficult politics, Facebook got freaked out about it, Facebook started taking tons of criticism from people like you and me about, you know, what the hell is happening on this platform? And started to try to figure out, you know, how can we, you know, keep our business, keep it really sticky, but — and — but engage people in things that don’t make them feel horrible about themselves, and they just made — and they made a series of — I mean, they would now say, also, mistakes in how they run about this.

ISAACSON: Like what? What was a big mistake, you think?

SMITH: The most — I mean, the biggest was shifting after Donald Trump was elected and they felt that their platform was — had been poisoned by politics. They said, you know what, people are engaging in ways that are not meaningful to them, that are sort of ephemeral and they feel bad about, and we’re going to switch to a technical measure called meaningful social interaction that is about — you know, about signs, like writing a comment that mean you really care about this thing that you saw. And really, what it did was inflame the absolute worst and most divisive stuff. And there’s an e-mail in there from 2018 that Jonah had sent to — that Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, send to a senior person at Facebook saying, hey, I don’t know if you guys see what you’re doing here, but we are finding that the things that spread most on Facebook are sort of inside jokes about race in particular that escape that inside. You know, the post in particular was a post that was like, you know, things white people like to do. That was like a funny joke among friends that if it spread widely enough became — people interpreted as insulting and offensive. And Facebook was seeing people being insulted, being offended, and saying, wow, this is so meaningful. This is great engagement. Let’s show it to more people. And was amplifying, in particular, the most racially divisive content they could find

ISAACSON: You know, you look at Jonah Peretti and the BuzzFeed crowd and Kenny Lerer and yourself, it was generally trying to find a way that our country could be better, it was sort of a Barack Obama hope moment. And yet, it ends up producing, not only a populism of the far-left and far- right, but a Donald Trump. How did that happen?

SMITH: You know, one of, to me, the most fascinating things about going back to this period where all these people who, really, in the case of having to post explicitly founded this thing to get someone like Obama elected or work to elect him and thought that they — that that represented the culmination of this internet they build. Obama visits Facebook, kind of obvious in moment that Facebook is a Democratic Party thing, beyond progressive people. And yet, all along, the people who would found the new far-right were hanging around. Andrew Breitbart, who was a key Trump promoter, was among the founders of — whose site was a key Trump, was one of the founders of “Huffington Post.” The guy who founded a site called 4Chan worked out of BuzzFeed’s offices for a while. And they were sort of learning from all of these techniques that we were creating. But we were very constrained by, among other things, like we didn’t want to write things that weren’t true and we were trying to do a kind of traditional journalism in a new form, with all of the caveats and to be sure and questions about fairness that came with that. And in fact, in 2016, I, you know, sat down with Steve Bannon, the — Trump’s campaign chairman then, in Trump Tower, and he was just totally perplexed that we had not turned into a Bernie Sanders propaganda outlet the way Breitbart had turned into a Trump propaganda outlet, not because he believed in Bernie Sanders, but just because that’s just where the traffic was, and that’s the sort of heat and the signal he had followed. And because, I think, they had no constraints, because they were totally invested in really tearing down the existing system. They, in some ways, were much more successful than this social media ecosystem than anyone else.

ISAACSON: You talk about Andrew Breitbart, and in your book, there’s a wonderful chapter on Matt Drudge. And in some ways, he’s the godfather of all of that because he is just aggregating little things that people can click on but doing it with a political slant. And I remember, and you certainly talk about it, a seminal moment in internet history. When I was at “Time” magazine, “Newsweek” was beating us on the story of Monica Lewandowski, but nobody was publishing it yet because we hadn’t pinned it down. And after “Newsweek” doesn’t publish it one Saturday night, Drudge publishes is on a Sunday, and it just changes everything. There are no longer gatekeepers in the news business. Tell me about how that affected all this?

SMITH: Yes. I mean, I think that the early beginnings of this were this assault on the gatekeepers and who — and certainly in the case of “Gawker” and I think in the way that I saw my work at “BuzzFeed.” And remember, this was soon off the Iraq war. And I think the gatekeepers were seen as sclerotic (ph) and corrupt and having — you know, having really profoundly messed up the most important story of that generation. And so, there was this real kind of positive energy around, we can’t — you know, we can’t — we got to build a new media that is more transparent, that’s open to outside voices, that’s going to listen to the people who say there are weapons of mass discussion, even if they’re not — they don’t have the rank in the White House. And I think that was actually feeding a lot of that energy. I mean, I think, if you look back now, you say, wow, we really did a number on these institutions, and they’re in terrible shape and the project now is, we’ve got to, you know, buttress the remaining ones and build new ones.

ISAACSON: Do you actually feel that, that maybe this whole thing did help undermine our institutions and you are kind of sorry for that?

SMITH: Yes, I do. I mean, I think that the institutions — I mean, it’s complicated, right? I mean, the pendulum swings. These institutions had earned their undermining. I think that, you know, the anger at the mainstream media after the Iraq war was totally justified. And I think it was very healthy for them to face a challenge. That said, you know, 15 years later, the damage — and I don’t think this is about — what a few blogs attack on media particularly, right, like all institutions in society have been really shaken and eroded by a number of different factors. But I do think that if you think about where we are now, the project is about building institutions, it’s about, you know, trying to buttress and strengthen the existing ones that came under this incredibly fierce assault, in part from social media, and in a way that was kind of wraparound social media.

ISAACSON: So, one of the most self-reflective chapters in the book is about this deal, dossier. And you’ve been sort of a minor character through the book. I love the way you sort of handle your role. But suddenly, you are the central player, and you publish this dossier that tries to connect, not only Trump campaign to Russia, but has all sorts of salacious things, and it turns out not to be fully vetted or fully true, other journalist hadn’t published it. BuzzFeed News does it. Tell me in retrospect what you feel whether you did not right or not.

SMITH: You know, in retrospect, I do, as I wrote, think that we should have published it. And I don’t think it was — I think that the specifics matter these stories. I do think that probably the reason that we publish it rather than somebody else is that we did have this instinct and this tendency borne of the internet to say, hey, like, we’re not gatekeepers. Our —

ISAACSON: Well, wait. Let me push back for a moment —

SMITH: Yes.

ISAACSON: — because it was wrong. It was misinformation.

SMITH: Oh, yes.

ISAACSON: What —

SMITH: And nobody thinks. And this is what I’m saying, nobody thinks that if I send you an e-mail full of crazy allegations you should tweet it. The specific situation there though was that this document had been influencing American politics at the highest level for months. Harry Reid had written a letter to James Comey saying, I know you have these secrets, release them. John McCain had it and was acting based on it. And James Comey had then briefed it to two presidents, the sitting president, Barack Obama, the president-elect, Donald Trump. And then, CNN had reported that there is this document that’s been briefed to these two presidents, it’s affecting policy over — all over of the place. And by the way, that says the president of the United States has been compromised by the Russians. That’s the point at which I think —

ISAACSON: But —

SMITH: — you can’t sit there and say, I have in my hand a list of communists, I’m not going to show you the list. Once you have just characterized the document, as a court later found in part, you — the notion that it should just sit there and that you and I should say to your viewers, to my readers, hey, we’ve seen it, it would burn your eyes out if you saw it. We don’t really trust you, doctor, lawyer, teacher to look at it. I just think isn’t — actually, it’s just not tenable. That said, when we published it, we wrote that we hadn’t — we’ve been trying for weeks to report on the allegations in Moscow and Prague, we hadn’t been able to stand up or knock down the key ones, but that we found errors in it. There were just some little descriptive stuff about Moscow that was wrong, Alfa-Bank was spelled wrong. And we wrote a kind of caveat emptor, published the story with the caveat. We publish the document in the caveat and it went and totally — and the caveat was sort of cast aside, the document became this symbolic element of gospel. And I don’t know if it would’ve made that much of a difference if we tried to staple them together better, but I do regret that.

ISAACSON: The fundamental structure of this era you’ve talked about, the traffic era, we’ll call it, or going viral era, it’s trying to capture people’s attention. But there are only a certain number of eyeballs in the whole world that you can capture, and there’s only a certain amount of advertising. Was there something structurally wrong about this business model?

SMITH: Yes. There was a core mistake about traffic, which was, I think, the people who first discovered it was, wow we can get people to click on our website, we can sell advertising, thought they had kind of struck digital oil. The more we get, the more money we’re going to make. And by the way, this thing is in its infancy. You know, even 2003 we’re selling these very rudimentary ads for $9 for a thousand views, like we’re going to be selling a thousand times more of them 4,000 times more per view. And actually, it was not like oil, because oil is scarce and traffic is plentiful, and it’s not a commodity. And in fact, the price of an — today, the price of the kinds of ads that they were selling in 2003 is lower than the price they were selling for in 2003. Not adjusted for inflation. And so, the core notion that you could sell limited attention just was swallowed by the scale, in particular, of Google and Facebook who had infinite access to people’s eyeballs and more sophisticated things they could do with those eyeballs.

ISAACSON: The new business model that seems to be emerging, once again, you’re helping to lead it. Semafor, your new publication, seems to be a new way of looking how do you do valuable enough journalism that people will pay for, not totally beholden to clicks and advertising revenue? Explain what you’re doing with Semafor, you and Justin Smith, and how a few others seem to be saying, this is the next wave?

SMITH: Well, I think in this new moment, kind of amid the rubble of social media and all the things that we built and the — what consumers want is so different. So, what we’re trying to do is hire journalists who really know what they’re talking about, who can really be fair, but who are also transparent about their own opinions. And you can say, here is what I’ve reported, here’s the scoop, here’s what I think about it. And by the way, here’s what somebody who disagrees with me thinks about it, and here’s some other pieces, views from around the world, from other perspectives, that we’re going to pull all together in one place for you so you don’t have to read a story, wonder if it’s true, Google, 11 other stories on the same time to kind of triangulate the truth, which I think is how a lot of people try to navigate at this moment.

ISAACSON: Thank you for being with us, Ben

SMITH: Thank you so much, Walter.