In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, CEO of online publisher BuzzFeed, sent an email to an executive at Facebook. He said that the most controversial content produced by publishers went viral on Facebook, which stimulated more such content to be produced.
He mentioned that a BuzzFeed article entitled “21 Things That Almost All White People Are Guilty Of Saying” was a great success, and the article received 1.3 on Facebook. Ten thousand shares and 16,000 comments, many of them criticizing BuzzFeed for writing such articles, and those users arguing with each other over race. He said that other content produced by the company, whether it is news videos, health articles or posts about animals, is difficult to break through.
According to the internal Facebook documents that cited the above emails seen by the “Wall Street Journal”, Peretti accused Facebook of its news feed (News…
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