Deepfake Drake + HatGPT + Ben Smith on the End of the BuzzFeed Era

23:22We've talked on this show about how one of the things that we need to just do with these AI models is just start exploring them and learning how to use them, becoming literate in the ways that you talk to chatbots. And so my argument for why this is actually a good thing is that I think teens should be forced to learn about these chatbots because they're going to be using them to do their homework anyway. They might as well learn how to do some other things with them too. Indeed. Now, pass the hat. Okay. I guess you got to pick this one. Yeah, I get to pick this one. All right. This one says, Taylor Swift was apparently the only celeb too smart to fall for FTX.

23:56This is from New York Magazine. According to the attorney Adam Moskowitz, who is leading a class action lawsuit against FTX and its celebrity spokespeople, Taylor Swift was considering an endorsement deal in the fall of 2021. But Moskowitz said that during the discovery process, the singer actually asked, can you tell me that these are not unregistered securities? I love this story. A question that no venture capitalist ever dared to ask Sam Bankman-Fried. Taylor Swift did better due diligence on FTX, the failed crypto exchange, than almost all of FTX's investors. She did. And look, Kevin, I know you're not surprised by this, but to the extent that anyone is, let me just say, this is one of the great business people of our time.

24:37It's true. look at what she has done from re-recording her old recording so that she has total control over them going forward to all of her other business ventures, which are numerous and incredible. This person knows what she is doing and hats off to her for, you know, asking the right question. Totally. All the other celebrities, you know, Tom Brady, Giselle, they were all like, you know, signing these endorsement deals. And Taylor Swift took one look at FTX and said, you know what, this doesn't actually check out to me. I wish I could have been there in the room when she looked Sam Bankman-free dead in the eye, which this never happened, by the way.

25:09But she looked him dead in the eye, and she said, you know what? On that cap table, you're going to have to leave that blank space. Come on. Wow. I knew it was coming, but I didn't know which song it was going to be. That's because you know me all too well, Kevin. 10-minute version. So, okay, your turn. All right. Let's see what we got here. Bop-bop. Why researchers turned this goldfish into a cyborg. This is from the New York Times. Scientists perform brain surgery on goldfish to place electrodes threaded through tiny holes in the fish's skull to a recording device attached to its head that could monitor neuronal activity.

25:45I imagine that's activity related to the neurons. They're trying to see, quote, how fish navigate the world using different brain circuits than those relied on by mammals like us. Oh, and there's a picture in this article. Oh my God. Oh my God. The fish is like wearing what looks like a GoPro on its head? Yeah, except the GoPro is half of the size of the fish. Right. So it is a very large, well, probably actually quite small, but so is a goldfish, like thing that is mounted onto its head, looks like a GoPro, and is monitoring the brain activity of the fish. So just imagine you're a goldfish swimming around a tank, and all of a sudden, someone reaches down and threads tiny holes in your skull.

26:27Bad day for this fish. Well, according to this article, scientists are curious about the underlying brain mechanisms that allow fish to navigate their world and how such mechanisms relate to the evolutionary routes of navigation for all creatures with brain circuitry. I will say this is an area of science that has long fascinated me, like how animals navigate. This area of science has long fascinated me. Well, by that I mean I read one New Yorker article on it about four years ago and been thinking about it ever since, which is like how do animals know where they're going, right? You have these migratory birds that like end up in the same places every year.

27:04Like they don't have Google Maps. They're not doing turn-by-turn GPS. And yet they end up in the same place every year at the same time. Yeah, this is one of those where it makes you wonder if we actually are living in a simulation. Yes, birds aren't real. Okay. Okay, let's try another one out of the hat. The RNC released an AI-generated ad slamming Joe Biden's. This is from Axios. It says, the video features AI-created images appearing to show Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris celebrating at an election day party followed by a series of imagined reports about international and domestic crises that the ad suggests would follow a Biden victory in 2024.

27:44I'm imagining that these crises were like everyone was wearing the Balenciaga Pope coat. and it just shows all Americans. Why is Drake the Secretary of Defense? That's weird. Well, so, look, this is an interesting one, right? I think you can sort of all begin to write your pieces about how 2024 is going to be the AI election. I'm, I guess, in part surprised that Republicans got there first just because this seems like a very sort of cutting-edge, next-generation thing that I don't always associate with their media strategy. But on the other hand, we know that this stuff is cheap. And if you don't care if it's accurate or not, go ahead, use the AI to make all your ads.

28:23Totally. I mean, I will say like political ads have always had a very sort of liberal definition of what constitutes the truth, right? There's just been like lots of attack ads over the years that have used like manipulated images. I remember they've darkened Barack Obama's skin tone in an attack ad. So like the idea of using technology to doctor or otherwise manipulate imagery that goes into of political ad is not new, right? What is new is like being able to do it in more realistic ways. But I sort of feel the same way I do about this that I do about the AI music, which is like, I don't think Joe Biden is in danger of being deep faked in a way that it's going to hurt his candidacy in 2024, in part because the real Joe Biden is the president and can come out and say that's not real, right?

29:04I think what is much more plausible is actually somebody saying that something is AI generated when it wasn't, right? I think if you have, you know, if the Access Hollywood tape had come out in 2024 instead of 2016, I think Donald Trump's first response would have been, that's a deep fake. That wasn't actually me. And a lot of people would have probably believed him. Yeah. And so we are going to have to develop tools to determine the provenance of these sort of things. So agreed. There's a lot of really weird and dark stuff coming. But I do feel like this was the week where we sort of saw the opening salvo of these wars.

29:39It's like, OK, well, here's your first AI political ad. Totally. And I think there's going to be a whole like cottage industry of professional political operatives who are using AI to like try to do attack ads for different candidates. I think that will probably be more successful on the local level than maybe the state level. National politics, who knows, but we may see a big, you know, October surprise AI deepfake this next election cycle, but I would sort of bet against it. Yeah. And to that point, I do think this stuff gets easier to pull off when you just don't know the candidate that well, right?

30:09So like the reason it'll work better at the local level is It's like, well, maybe you've never heard of the other person running for Congress in your district. And then you see a deep fake of them. What's something funny that they could do? Doing whippets. Doing whippets. We can't say doing whippets. Why not? Because we could start a national whippets craze. Do not do whippets, kids. Stop doing whippets, kids. Knock it off. All right, next one. This one says, UK blocks Microsoft's$69 billion bid for Activision, a blow for tech deals. This is from the New York Times. British antitrust regulators on Wednesday, Delta Major set back to Microsoft's plans to acquire the video game giant Activision Blizzard for$69 billion, blocking the proposed deal and handing a notable win to government enforcers who want to rein in big tech.

30:58Well, I think this is a really important thing. Activision Blizzard makes some of the most popular video game franchises in the world, including Call of Duty and Overwatch and others. And as always with antitrust, there's a few things to keep in mind. The way that antitrust was practiced for most of the last 50 years was that the focus was really on consumer welfare. Basically, the idea that having robust competition is always better for consumers. But lately, they've been going back to this idea that the bigger and more powerful a company is, the more it essentially structures the market in a way that just makes them more powerful.

31:34And so you get regulators saying, wait a minute, we can't let these companies get too big. And so I was actually sympathetic to the idea that maybe you don't want this acquisition to go through. Maybe you don't want Microsoft owning yet another of the biggest video game companies as part of what is already their pretty big video game business. Now, Microsoft would say, we're not actually that big. Sony is much bigger. In the gaming market. In the gaming market. And I was just sort of never convinced that this was going to be pro-competitive. To me, it seems obvious that the more video game companies you have on the market, the more competitive it's going to be.

32:07and so I was always uncomfortable with this one. Yeah, but I think a lot of people did assume that it was going to go through. It seemed like for a while, like Microsoft was kind of playing the regulatory game very well and doing what they needed to do to avoid having regulators come down on them like this. At the same time, like that's not the only market that matters for them. Yeah, so Microsoft's going to fight it. Maybe they win it on appeal, but this is a big one and one to watch. And I think it will sort of tell us a lot about the extent to which these giants are going to be able to make huge acquisitions over the next few years.

32:37Yeah, I think there's sort of like a default assumption now that at least I'm going over it. Like if even Microsoft can't sort of thread the needle with a big acquisition of a gaming company, which, by the way, is not its primary thing that it does. The vast majority of its revenue comes from things that have nothing to do with video games. And so if even they can't acquire this video game company, like I just think there's a certain, like if you are one of the top three tech companies in the world, I think your default assumption should be that you are not going to be allowed to buy anything.

33:02Yeah, so maybe go try to build something. Yeah. It's time to build. Yeah, it's time to build. And that was at GPT. That was fun. Close the hat.

33:13When we come back, we're going to talk to Ben Smith, the former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief and former New York Times media columnist about how tech giants shaped the media of the 2010s. And also, what color was that dress? We're going to solve it. We're going to crack the case.

33:48So Casey, a story that we have talked a lot about in kind of an indirect way on this show is the relationship between the big tech platforms and the media, right? This kind of like symbiotic, but also antagonistic relationship that exists at times between companies like Facebook and Twitter and companies like the New York Times and Platformer, and how the decisions that are made by the big tech companies about what to put in people's feeds and how to rank their algorithms really have consequences for journalists, for media companies, and for ultimately media consumers. And as we've been talking about this story, I was reading an advance copy of a new book by our friend Ben Smith.

34:34Ben is the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, which recently announced that it is being shut down. He's also a former New York Times media columnist and now runs a new media company called Semaphore. And he's really an interesting person to talk to about this topic because he was so close to the action. I mean, You can remember back to, let's say, 2015, it really seemed like BuzzFeed had really caught a tiger by the tail and was in a leading dominant position in the digital media business. And Ben was a big part of that operation. But it's also a huge gossip. Yeah, we love talking to Ben.

35:12We should also mention, like, both you and I are thanked in the acknowledgments of his book. I did skim the index. I was acknowledged? Oh, that's nice. I know. So he is a friend of the pod and also just a really interesting person to talk to about digital media. His book, Traffic, comes out next week.

35:47Ben Smith, welcome to Hard Fork. Thank you guys for having me.

36:18in downtown Manhattan. And there was this moment, it's like almost impossible to remember now, where it was like, oh my God, has the center of technological innovation and venture capital investment shifted from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley in Manhattan? Because there were these new kind of media-centric tech startups, some of which were really just media, like Gawker, BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Business Insider, and some of which were like tech media, like Foursquare. But there was this sense of this kind of dynamic new New York scene where, you know, culture was being made and money was being made.

36:55Yeah. It's a really interesting time to be having this conversation because I think we've seen just in the last couple of weeks, like the real tail end of that era. So BuzzFeed News, where you were the founding editor-in-chief, is closing down. Obviously, Gawker is no more. And there are a host of other sort of failed websites, including one that I worked at called Fusion. So what do you make of the sort of closure of BuzzFeed News and what it means for the closing of that chapter in media and maybe what comes next? Yeah, I mean, it makes me incredibly sad. And I think it's, you know, the big story was that there was this new kind of media, social media that promised to and really did transform news and journalism and media.

37:42And a group of companies, in some ways, BuzzFeed, most successful of them all, really built on top of it. And it's not like we didn't know when we were building it that we had what they call in decks a dependency on Facebook. But it's also very hard to get out from under that, right? When you're riding this immense tide to think, oh, we got to figure out some other side business. And so I think the big story is these companies were totally dependent on the social media ecosystem, which is itself collapsing. So let me just try to paint a picture of the internet in the sort of early mid 2010s because i think even though we all lived through it it's feels very far from the moment that we have today i remember in like 2012 i want to say or maybe 2013 there were these sort of signs that there was this huge surge in traffic coming from social media and no one could really figure out where it was and eventually it turned out that was from facebook and it was the kind of numbers that like media companies just don't see i mean just astronomical amounts of traffic coming to their websites.

38:47And that seems like the sort of precursor to the world that you document in this book of these new media companies, Gawker, BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, etc., that sort of came in to ride that wave and try to turn that into a sustainable business. Is that right? Is that the sort of inciting event of this whole boom in digital media in the 2010s? Yeah, I think that the massive ocean of traffic from Facebook was what delivered these numbers that prompted venture capitalists to pour, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars into digital media. And the notion that, well, if you're getting a billion users and each user is worth$100, like this is a lot of money.

39:32I mean, I think that was the basic math. And were there people at the time who thought like, maybe this isn't sustainable. Maybe this is just, because I think we now know, and you write about in your book, that some of the reason for this huge surge in traffic was because Facebook was trying to kill Twitter, right? Like Twitter was growing as a rival and Facebook was saying, well, you know, we can't allow them to overtake us. And so we will just flood the newsfeed with news sites, with, you know, publications so that we can try to steal some of that momentum away. Yeah. I mean, this is, I mean, I think if Facebook had to have that back, they might have said, wow, you know what, Twitter, you can own this entire toxic stew and we will be a great place to like sell washing machines.

40:16There was this tactical decision by Facebook to copy as it had copied lots of other apps, what this rising little app called Twitter was doing, which was provide news to people. Facebook never actually really got particularly good at the live news thing, but they sort of accidentally became the absolute part of the digital publishing industry and delivered all these views to publishers who, you know, the views kept getting less valuable. This was the sort of thing you were seeing out of the corner of your eye and the little alarm bell ringing that, wow, like I, you know, I had 100 million views last year and 200 million views this year and my revenue has gone up 5%.

40:53Like what's going on here? Why, why is it that doubling audience growth doesn't equate to doubling revenue growth. Like what was the hypothesis there that proved wrong? So I think it's maybe a lot to call it a hypothesis, maybe a delusion, but there was this new ad inventory on the internet and you could sell it and there wasn't that much of it. And the problem with commodities is that they derive their value from scarcity. You know, there's only so much gold in the world and so it has a certain value, oil. The problem was these new factories Google, and Facebook particularly generate infinite scale.

41:31And if you're selling something of which there's an infinite amount, it doesn't have a lot of value. I remember at one point, BuzzFeed was doing, I want to say, like 7 billion content views a month, which in the history of the media business was sort of on the far end of success, right? There haven't been many businesses built bigger than that. So if I had been in your guys' shoes, I would have done the exact same thing as you did. We've built one of the biggest media companies of all time. let's hire a bunch of reporters and and see what we can do um but at the same time looking back it does seem like it was a mirage so so i wonder for you is there a sense of astonishment that it turned out the way it did given the scale that you guys had achieved so i don't think it was a mirage i think the world changed and changed again and i guess i'm no longer astonished because i think we felt the peak the crest you know 2015 2016 you can't really separate media from the culture around it and the way people saw news changed around the Trump election and didn't change back.

42:30I mean, I do want to talk about this issue of sort of the relationship between digital media companies and social media companies during this period, because, you know, Casey and I both worked in digital media at this time. And I think there was this feeling like we were sort of the ox peckers who like lived on the back of the rhino, you know, and we're just... What did you just call me? Like, you know, those little birds. Okay. And we were so dependent on traffic because it was such a big percentage of incoming views were from Facebook that you basically existed at the mercy of these large platform companies.

43:06And they could just decide at any moment to turn the spigot off or to turn it on and give you more traffic. And one of the things that I actually found really interesting in your book is that BuzzFeed was sort of cultivating a relationship, like a special relationship with Facebook that allowed it to sort of surf this wave better than most publishers. So talk about that relationship, these large social media companies that are just sort of throwing their weight around, changing their algorithms in ways that like, you know, they turn the dial one notch. And for the rest of the digital media ecosystem, it means like a seismic change that everyone has to adapt to.

43:41yeah oh for and i love the metaphor and the rhinos obviously live in silicon valley and the rhino peckers ox peckers they're the little birds that like live on the back of the rhino we've got to stop talking about these peckers but go on they they they live in new york and there's some there's some sense in which i think this book is like told from looking in the wrong side of the telescope i mean the the power and the biggest decisions are being made in silicon Valley and media is downstream of them. I think what Jonah Peretti, my former boss and partner at BuzzFeed, saw was, and the reason that I think that we navigated this so successfully, there were two.

44:19One was that a lot of publishers saw these platforms as fundamentally technical, that you could figure out technical rules that you could then tell your team the way SEO is technical. Follow these rules and it will gain the platform and you will gain an advantage. but in fact the platforms are run by people who are not morons and if you figured out some trick it's a bug and they'll fix it and jonah always steered away from the gimmicky stuff and toward well like what do people on these platforms are ultimately places where human beings are gathering if you have a really good sense that they want to be entertained they want to be informed you give them stuff that does that it's going to survive the minor changes to the platforms and he then also had this very warm strong two-way relationship with mark zuckerberg and with other executives at facebook where he was giving them ideas about how to run their platforms and also learning and gathering intel from them that was that was certainly shaping what we were right i mean it seemed like he was essentially kind of running the facebook news feed at certain points during its existence i mean zuckerberg right before I started at BuzzFeed, Facebook tried to acquihire Jonah.

45:27How do you think the world would be different today if that had happened? If Mark Zuckerberg had succeeded in buying BuzzFeed and making Jonah the head of the newsfeed? Well, I would still be blogging at Politico. And I do think that it would have been nice if somebody in that Facebook product organization, or whatever you ever want to call it, was thinking more about how human beings use media in real life rather than about these abstract measures of engagement. I don't know if that really would have been Jonah, but that's what I like to think. One more question about Facebook. There's a really interesting scene in your book.

46:09It's 2015 and the dress has just happened, this mega viral post about this dress and whether it's, what was it, blue and gold? White and gold or blue and black. And it goes nuts. Millions and millions of views. Everyone sees it. It's kind of this epical event in 2010's internet history. And everyone at BuzzFeed is very proud, understandably, of this successful post. And Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, is talking to Adam Masseri, who now runs Instagram, but at the time was in charge of the Facebook newsfeed. and as you report, Adam Masseri's response is basically like, how often do you think that something like the dress should happen?

46:54And you wrote that that surprised Jonah. You say, quote, to them, the dress hadn't been a goofy triumph. It had been a kind of bug, something that scared them. Why do you think that the dress scared Facebook? What happened with the dress was just this absolute loss of control of the platform, right like they were finally kind of on notice that they could do damage and you know i don't think it's crazy to think wow like today it's this really fun dress you know what is it tomorrow it now seems obvious that what y 'all were doing at the time was just a lot of experimenting you were discovering what would happen if you wrote different kinds of things and i think the facebook era of journalism was probably the most instrumented that journalism had ever been, right?

47:43We didn't used to have this kind of insight into what people liked and what they didn't as much. And so I can understand why you would just kind of follow those numbers to see where they would go for as long as you did. Yeah. And at times, those numbers were an insight essentially to human psychology and what are people interested in at their best. And at times, they were an insight into what were the technical decisions people at Facebook or Google had made about what they thought people should want. And sometimes they were a kind of, you know, a combination of those two. So now we're in 2023, the sort of traffic fire hose of Facebook and Twitter to the extent it ever was one and all these other platforms has kind of slowed to a trickle.

48:27And so this competition for traffic, for audience, for whatever you want to call it, seems like it's drawing to a close. So what defines the media moment that we're currently in? And what are the platform dependencies that you see right now that publishers maybe should be worried about, given what happened last time? Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, and I think part of the reason I went out to start a new thing is because I think one of the things I did learn from BuzzFeed is when these moments of immense change, there is this opportunity to kind of actually go to consumers and say, you know, you're sick of being limited to only reading a couple of newspapers, like, good news you can read everything in the world at the same time and also have everyone's opinion and now i think it's more like you know you're sick of having everyone in the world screaming at you at the top of their lungs at the same time being overwhelmed and then simultaneously not knowing who to trust like okay we will try to build a straightforward transparent kind of journalism that also does a really good job pulling in everybody else's work and linking to it and sharing what else is out there so you don't have to go and google 11 versions of the same story to triangulate what's really going on.

49:31But I think, I mean, I think email is a real dependency. Do you think that everybody will be using email the way they do in 10, 15 years? I use it a lot less than I used to. I think, you know, TikTok, which is this seductive, incredible platform that has enormous scale among people who care about news, people who care about technology, all sorts of stuff, has also all of the risks that, you know, Facebook did for publishers. But I think that has made people incredibly leery of going on there in a way that maybe is itself a little self, you know, you can overlearn these lessons. I mean, those are, to me, the obvious platform dependencies.

50:06There's one that you didn't mention, which is Google, which I feel like most of the digital publishers I know are just hugely dependent. And if you can get your story underneath that Google search bar, and it's mostly just the worst clickbait you've ever seen. I mean, it's like, it's worse than what was on Facebook in 2015 is under the Google search box right now. Now, how have you thought about Google as you try to build a thing? And I'm curious how at risk you think the other publishers are of Google one day waking up and turning off that spigot. You know, I didn't mention it because I, in my own mind, have thought I don't want to build on top of it.

50:41It's a pretty broken experience now. You search where to eat in New York, you get 11 different kind of sets of garbage links. You have to go to the 17th page to find somebody's blog that can tell you, name a restaurant for you. And then also just that it's now suddenly under attack from a number of directions. I mean, these sort of AI chatbots are one of them. But also people get sick of things. They don't last forever. And I think the sort of web search feels like a declining stock and publishers who are really wedded to it just feel like they're going to be squeezed into being like low-quality AI-written garbage content farms.

51:20Well, I'm glad you brought that up because this is my big fear about the future of news is that right now so much digital media is supported by that kind of very quick, easy, cheap to produce material that probably has an affiliate link in it to buy something. And right now a junior staffer is being paid a living wage at a lot of places to bang out three or four of those posts every single day. Does that sort of job seem as at risk to you as it does to me? Yeah, I think if you are reorganizing and reframing the stuff that's already out there, rather than reporting, bringing something new in, those are the jobs that are most vulnerable to AI.

52:02I want to talk about AI more because you at Semaphore have been experimenting with AI in ways that I found really interesting and really different than a lot of publishers who I think are either trying to use this to churn out like low quality SEO bait or are just sort of scared of the whole thing and don't really know how to approach it yet or are having a bunch of meetings talking about how their AI strategy is going to look. So what is your AI strategy at Semaphore? And how are you thinking about this new world of generative AI? Yeah, I mean, I guess we think about it as a tool. And in some sense, you know, I think we're trying to like work on the high end of really human created journalism where you know the person's name and she's a star and you feel connected to her and want to know what she thinks about her area of expertise.

52:46And so that's not that's not in the realm of things that can be replaced by AI. But there are tools I think that are just amazing. I mean, the video tools to me are the most obvious. Like the text to video, like type in text that generates video? No, if you look at Joe Posner, who helped create Explained at Vox, you know, has been doing these videos for us that intersperse animation with, you know, videos and words. And creating animation is something, you know, I don't know, $3 ,000,$10 ,000 a minute to do in the past. And he's working with this artist in Australia who's doing it, using Stable Diffusion for like, you know, for an amount that we can afford.

53:23it's not like we're you know putting some animator out of work we just wouldn't be doing it and i think just in the way that you know the creation of digital video with your phone suddenly meant a lot of people could create video some of these video tools are going to further mean that making movies is less a technical skill still an incredibly competitive and difficult creative skill but i think that's really powerful and interesting and sure it will also lead to all sorts of dumb scams and scary scams and, you know, popes wearing weird jackets and stuff. But if you still kind of have some connection to the notion of the internet as this democratizing force, it is the democratization of these really cool, interesting tools.

54:03And then just in terms of workflow, I mean, I don't think anybody looks at Grammarly, which is a pretty cool piece of software and says like, this is a threat to journalism. I mean, it's a threat to like my constant typos, but I think there are AI tools that can make you a better writer. And there are also journalists who are not particularly good writers and people who didn't go to fancy schools, but who are great reporters and who the kind of hollowing out of editing in newsrooms left outside. There used to be a rewrite, you know, rewrite men, get me rewrite, which meant that a reporter did not need to be a fancy writer.

54:35They could be a great reporter. And if, I don't know, if a reporter of mine wanted to gather some facts and put them into ChatGPT before they filed them to me, look them over and file them, and that made them feel better about it. like, fine. You give this piece of advice to everyone. It's one I've taken very seriously myself. And that piece of advice is that scoops matter more than everything else in journalism. And I wonder if you believe that that is more true in a world where AI is generating at least the first draft of most of the stories that you're reading. Yeah. I mean, I think news gathering is the thing that's going to be really hard for AI to do.

55:10Not that, by the way, you can't think about like, huh, like, could I sort of script some kind of email that emails 50 of my sources and says, hey, do you know anything about this? And arranges their answers in a way that I can find really usable if it isn't too obnoxious and doesn't freak them out too much. I mean, sure, maybe. But yeah, I think the most human parts of journalism are the ones that are going to be hardest to replace. I like to think that fortunately, like media reporting is like the absolute most inside your own naval pursuit in like possibly human society and so it's going to be like the last one hiding out from the robots i think all of us in this new ai world think that we secretly have the one job that is the least likely to be replaced by the robot you were one of the first media executives i knew who sort of went all in on twitter you were a heavy heavy tweeter.

56:03Everyone at BuzzFeed News was constantly tweeting all the time. It was a platform where you found writers and cultivated talent, but also where you distributed stories. What do you think the sort of diminishment of Twitter under Elon Musk has meant for the media? Do you miss the old Twitter? And so how are you thinking about Twitter as a part of the media business going forward? So somebody who had his brain basically kind of rewired by Twitter and really loved it for a while and met great sources, learned things on there. I mean, I'm pretty sad about it, honestly, personally. I do think that, you know, whether or not Elon had made certain decisions, people are sick of social media.

56:43People are leaving Facebook, not because it's technical architecture is a little wrong way. It's because these are social products. They're like nightclubs. They're like bars. You go there because your friends are there. They fall out of fashion for like ineffable reasons and everybody leaves. and you can't, that's not a stoppable thing. The police can't get a new sound system and you'll come back. It's just culture. I mean, I think you can see the lights going out. I think Musk, in some ways, drew a spasm of new attention to it on the way out. But I think basically people were gonna leave. It's a really tough time in journalism right now.

57:18I mean, it sort of seems like it's always a tough time in journalism, but I think just the sort of news of BuzzFeed News closing down, people losing jobs at other outlets, economic troubles, and the sort of dry up of advertising. There's a sense that there's sort of like a doom and gloom around the media industry right now. But there are some people who believe that the kind of death of social media and the traffic chasing that came with it is a good thing. Hilary Frey, who's the editor-in-chief of Slate, recently wrote a piece about this. And she wrote that, quote, being free of our reliance on tech platforms is going to be better for our business.

57:54The old traffic tricks don't work anymore. What does is great work and serving an audience who loves you so much they'll pay for you. That's actually always been the case with journalism. So is that something that you believe? Is this a good thing that we're sort of going back to the fundamentals of journalism and we're not sort of so obsessed with chasing this ephemeral social media traffic anymore? You know, I'm a little reluctant to say that every technological or social change should be put into the good thing or bad thing bucket. I think Fox, Buzzfeed, Vice, other publishers did amazing journalism that mattered an enormous amount and had incredibly salutary effects.

58:30Thawker, Jezebel in its era and the era changed and ended and those businesses could have been run better and they could have maybe found a narrow path through, but the pendulum swung. And I think there'll be things about subscription media and these sort of narrow cast sub stacks where you all, you just have to, you know, tell your followers over and over exactly what they want to hear. And, and, you know, that, that is, has its own problems. I mean, it's funny people talk about echo chambers, but the echo chambers are the closed ones. That's why they echo. Basically Twitter aren't echo chambers.

59:01There's something way crazier. And I think people are really eager to retreat back into echo chambers. It's probably much healthier to spend your time in an echo chamber than in like the wide open field, screaming at a bunch of maniacs you hate, But that has its own challenges and problems, and many of the most successful sub-stacks are the most partisan ones. Media is part of culture. It changes, it evolves, and I think it's kind of reluctant to say, well, this one's a good one now. They're all bad. This agrees. well we've been talking a lot of stuff about the meat industry but i think can we at least agree that it actually is still the most fun business like that if you set aside all of the problems that there is still nothing else that we personally would rather be doing right it beats working for a living ben thanks so much for coming thank you ben thank you for reading the book

1:00:19Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. We were edited this week by Paula Schumann and Jen Poyan. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Dan Powell, Alicia Baitoop, Marion Lozano, and Sophia Landman. Special thanks to Pui Wing Tam, Nalga Logli, Kate Lopresti, Christopher Sprigman, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com.

1:01:01Thank you.