by 2023 it seemed clear that the power of this new social energy had been to destroy any institution, from the media to the political establishment, that it touched. Those of us who work in media, politics, and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are

“The internet” had become, merely, society itself; the forces that had come to dominate it—populism to the right and the left, most of all—were social forces, not digital ones. The geniuses who succeeded in this era hadn’t dominated those forces. They had, like Trump, become their vessels; or, like Zuckerberg, offered them a channel. Jonah had

“BuzzFeed 101. He was just kind of optimizing.” Just as we’d been optimizing videos and posts for Facebook and Twitter, he’d been doing the same to himself. “His politics have been guided by platform metrics,” reflected a top BuzzFeed producer, Andrew Gauthier. Gionet’s colleagues had abided by some unspoken boundaries: factual accuracy, liberal

Facebook had succeeded in identifying what people would truly, meaningfully interact with, the things they would share and talk about. Their algorithm was holding an ever-more-precise mirror up to Americans’ psyches, and intensifying their strongest reactions. But the company’s obsession with metrics, with giving people exactly what they would

Even as BuzzFeed reached more and more people on platforms like YouTube and Snapchat, traffic seemed to be losing value at the same rate. It might not have been fool’s gold, exactly, but it wasn’t solid. The thing with a commodity is that it needs to be limited to have real value. When it came to traffic, there was too much of it out there, and

“we were over-optimistic on the timeline to transparency and the utopia that would inevitably result.” Even Nick Denton was disturbed by the forces he’d helped unleash. Looking for a precedent, Nick thought about the last revolution in information technology, which had happened just about two hundred miles north of Zurich, five hundred years

thought we were on the right side of the decade-old conflict between the transparent new internet and a legacy media whose power came in part from the information they withheld.

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

Most media CEOs viewed Facebook with incomprehension, or anger. It had built a better advertising product than they ever had, and ripped their core business out from under them. Then when they tried to talk to Zuckerberg, they met a robot who was half-idealism, half–naked ambition—and who didn’t seem to speak their language, of news and civic