Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 470

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral," by Ben Smith.

The Contagious Media Working Group, which met at Eyebeam, came up with another curious technical mechanism, called the reBlog. It was a clever little open-source script that, installed on your blog, allowed you to pull in a post from another site and promote it yourself. It was a version of an idea that Nick had been playing with at Moreover. Tim Shey, Jonah’s old roommate, liked reBlog enough to install it on his own blog and showed it to a young programmer, David Karp, who would implement it on a website he was developing, Tumblr. That technical trick drove Tumblr’s success, and was copied by other social networks—Facebook’s share, Twitter’s retweet. It would become the basic mechanism for a generation of amplifying everything from clever jokes to lies about elections.

Andrew told his own version years later, in a memoir called Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! In his account, Andrew hadn’t been the minion of the most powerful conservative blogger: he’d been his own man all along, a conservative who saw through the lies of liberal Hollywood, an agent behind enemy lines. Andrew’s story was so far from reality that the other Huffington Post founders couldn’t decide if he was joking or just lying. It was probably some of both—plus the fact that with his severe attention deficit disorder, Andrew had left most of the writing to a bright young assistant named Ben Shapiro. But the book offered a glimpse through the looking glass of the early internet, and a good sense of how the new Right, for a decade, would view the web that Facebook and Twitter, The Huffington Post and Gawker and BuzzFeed had created. 

In that telling, Andrew had abruptly discovered how intolerant the Democratic Party was—how obsessed with irrational hatred of George W. Bush and irrational opposition to the invasion of Iraq. He had realized that conservatives in Hollywood would be ostracized from the entertainment industry if they expressed those views, and that his highest mission would be to build a kind of underground social network of Hollywood conservatives. And “at the exact time when I was undergoing the fundamental recognition that my neighbors in West Los Angeles were acting to undermine national cohesion in a time of war, which put me in a perennial state of psychic dissonance . . . at exactly that point, I got a phone call from Arianna Huffington.”

Nick loved that self-exposure, and the traffic it brought. Holmes sometimes had to protect her writers from his excesses. Once, Nick caught wind of a date of Gerson’s that had gone horribly wrong. “Oh my God I heard about your date, you’ve got to write about that,” he told her, and she realized that “if you were working for Nick, traffic was your life.”

Nick, a purist at heart about the connection between searing exposés and traffic, also hated the mechanical way Jonah thought about the substance. Nick thought traffic was a sign of quality; Jonah simply thought it was a resource to be exploited, by whatever tactics—serious or silly, strange or brilliant, cheap or expensive—that came to hand. Where Nick had wanted AJ Daulerio’s brutal revelations, Jonah wanted journalism, sure. But he also wanted LilyBoo. 

To Jonah, and to financiers fixated on the idea of a new science of content, LilyBoo was the dream: machines, with a little human help, feeding culture back to itself, scaling to infinity. To Nick, this was pretty much the worst nightmare, an automated feed of algorithmic cuteness, harvesting traffic indiscriminately, anonymously shaped by the CEO himself. If you looked closely, sometimes the voice was a little robotic. “Just trying to think of ways to multiply cuteness,” read the caption to a list of “50 Toddlers Who Are Best Friends with Their Dogs.” As LilyBoo’s bio read, she was “obsessed with the maximally cute.” Jonah thought he might have in fact figured out how to maximize cuteness. 

BuzzFeed’s editors had learned through trial and error that social media was organized in large part around identities. Write compellingly about what it was like to be born in the 1990s, or to be an Iranian from New Jersey, or a Catholic girl, or to grow up with East Asian parents, and thousands of people would share the post with the magic words “this is me.” Their friends would click for a glimpse of insight. The traffic was guaranteed, and the posts extended BuzzFeed’s tendrils into new territories. 

To reach a broader audience, we needed people who could write about varied identities. That pushed BuzzFeed, whose small staff was nearly all white in its early days, to become among the most ethnically diverse of the new media companies. But we were still missing a big piece of American identity. We didn’t have any proud young conservatives, people who could write about what it was like to grow up with guns, say, or to appreciate how the Bush family respected veterans. Benny represented, to me, an untapped new well of traffic, a new identity to plumb. And so I didn’t look much beyond that NRA post, which took the BuzzFeed formula—a list of fun, emotionally resonant images—to gun culture. There was no reason that Tea Partiers couldn’t see themselves in BuzzFeed, I reasoned, and share elements of their culture—guns, cars, Bibles—just as our progressive audience was doing. 

More than ten million Americans were talking about Donald Trump on Facebook in the first week of July. The other hot Republicans—Ben Carson and Ted Cruz—were struggling to reach one million. BuzzFeed’s political editor, Katherine Miller, tried to explain what was happening to our readers: “Imagine the Hulk doing a cannonball into a pool and, as a result, all the other people and water in that pool being catapulted from it, so that the only thing left is the Hulk.” 

And then—it stayed that way. Through the summer and early fall, we stopped writing about the Facebook data because it didn’t say anything new. Americans were talking about only two people: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The conversation about Clinton tended to be negative. And nobody could get enough of Donald Trump. 

It’s understandable that panicked American Democrats and incredulous journalists were looking for the secret explanation for Trump’s victory. But if you zoom out from the United States in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century and look more widely, it’s hard to credit such theories. Perhaps Trump had some special sauce, or some special help—but then why would India’s right-wing populist strongman Narendra Modi similarly have become, as it was said, “King of Facebook”? Or how did Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro come to dominate the platform? What explains the social media power of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, or the surprise, Facebook-powered victory of Brexit in Great Britain? Trump was part of a pattern of confrontational, combative right-wing populism that swept the platform and the world. These leaders’ success on Facebook was no more complicated than their success on the mainstream media: they fed controversy and engagement. But while CNN and other mainstream broadcasters eventually began to rein in their own hunger for ratings as they saw Trump exploit their airtime to project a message that painted his enemies—and, ironically, those very television networks—as enemies of the state, Facebook had no comparable mechanism. Facebook measured engagement, and elevated it. It seemed perfectly logical if you were working on the internet then, doing your best to make your own posts generate engagement and go viral. Trump wasn’t doing anything to game Facebook. He simply was what Facebook liked.