Illustration by Matthew Cooley for Rolling Stone magazine
For months, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly delayed phasing out the blue verification checkmark for users who don’t subscribe to the site’s $8 subscription tier. It became the meme of Musk’s groping takeover of a social media site. “Last day to remove his check for legacy Blue is April 20th,” he tweeted earlier this month.By then, even skeptics knew that the eventual online CEO who seemed to have bought the company on a $44 billion whim would follow just to land the most corny joke imaginable. this is the same guy who tweeted He painted over the letter “w” on a billboard outside Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters to read “Titter.”
The end of the blue checkmark felt like the death knell of whatever platform was in the first place, capping off an ominous few weeks filled with signs that the culture that was born on social media in the 2010s was coming to an end. Hours before began reporting that verification checks had disappeared, another internet staple, BuzzFeed, announced it was shutting down its award-winning news division, citing lack of profitability. The news comes just weeks after the company launched its first AI-powered game format (in January, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced that the company would be using his AI-generated (he told staff that he plans to experiment with new content). quiz. According to Peretti, News’ closure is part of the company’s broader layoffs that cut nearly 15% of his workforce, ending his decade-long run of the brand as a leader in the online media industry. hit the
And this was the same week Universal Music removed Drake’s AI-generated song from its streaming platform after it went viral on TikTok and YouTube. Titled “Heart on My Sleeve”, the track was created by a creator called Ghostwriter977 and caused a frenzy within the music industry. The song is clearly not very good, but many feel it marks a major shift in how music is heard and made. When you think of BuzzFeed’s downfall alongside Elon Musk’s destruction of his Twitter, it feels like the end of how we think of the internet as a place for people. This is a move to the Internet that shares a lot of space with bots. In some ways it seems like the logical end of the last decade of online development.
BuzzFeed was known for its heavy traffic. The point was, in some ways, to see how far-reaching the idea could be, like finding out how many rubber bands it took to crush a watermelon in one of the most watched Facebook Live streams of the time. Today, that’s basically what TikTok is for. The organization has managed to cement the mechanized view of virality that has defined mainstream online culture for some time. introduced. One of Elon Musk’s first additions to Twitter was the introduction of the cursed “view” counter.
For many in the digital media world, BuzzFeed’s layoffs represent a common failure of logic online. In the 2010s, digital media companies were cast as heroes of the generation. Young (almost always white) founders imbued the culture with a religious devotion to metrics and explosive scale. You could argue that it worked to an extent, but ultimately virality becomes a feedback loop for him. In 2013, Internet researcher Nancy Baym wrote: paper Instead of providing something meaningful about the people viewing content on the platform, they argue that audience metrics are geared toward business interests. It’s part of our policy to set the count in a way that increases interest in the site while you’re there,” she wrote. “It is widely believed that higher numbers mean higher legitimacy, popularity, visibility, influence, and economic potential.”
An insatiable appetite for numbers may explain all bots. Despite what appears to be a significant business challenge, BuzzFeed’s move to his AI-generated content temporarily sent the stock price soaring. Elon Musk tried to block a Twitter takeover, claiming the company underestimated the bot problem, but his move since becoming owner has made fake accounts more receptive. Paying for verification will upend the last decade of online culture in the same way that AI-generated music and articles written by bots did. In the 2010s, it seemed that we approached social media with the belief that these new platforms could enable us to build new worlds, but the technology being deployed today is for machines. Sticking to the built world.
