Buzz Off!

When did Buzzfeed start to take over the Internet? From the daily lists that crowd my Facebook newsfeed to the animal memes on every computer screen in lecture, it’s hard to escape the Buzz. I, too, had a Buzzfeed obsession for a while. I would peruse lists late at night as a stress release, occasionally emitting a “lol” at a particularly resonating post. But these days I’ve come to think that Buzzfeed is seriously, even sickeningly flawed.

As a news source, Buzzfeed is hyperbolic, exploitive, and desensitizing. As a fun site for lists and gifs, it whitewashes individualized colorful experiences and feeds a narcissistic nostalgia already too prevalent among our generation. I have read countless lists with titles along the lines of “50 Things You Miss About the ‘90s” that simultaneously reduce my own personal experiences to mere symptoms of mass culture and also plunge me into a strange yearning for a past of Cabbage Patch Kids (even though I was always more of a My Little Pony girl). Buzzfeed’s main takeaway is speed—read a quick article summarizing the health care debate, remember your childhood with a few swift clicks—and its emphasis on rapid-fire too often feels soulless.

The way that Buzzfeed presents “hardcore news” side by side with adorable pictures of cats is psychotic. In the same radius you’re expected to contemplate headlines such as “Bomb Kills 50” and “Adorable Puppy Rides Bicycle.” With this juxtaposition, the reader’s emotions are confused: horror and sweetness become repellently mixed. The emotional intensity of a story is cheapened, and our respect for the integrity of the site questioned. It seems intuitive that we ought to separate stories about fat cats from stories on suicide bombers. But Buzzfeed constantly blurs the lines.

Am I being dramatic? Let’s look at just this week. On January 23, the horrifying story “Indian Woman Allegedly Gang-Raped On Orders from Her Village Council” was featured directly above “This is Just What Lambs Do When you Pick them Up.” On January 27, the disturbing piece “HIV Student Allegedly Filmed Secret Sex With more than 30 Unknowing Partners” was right below “16 Things Teen Girls Wore in the Winter of 1996.” Buzzfeed treats violence and hardship simply as additional forms of entertainment, and the ultimate effect is to desensitize the reader.

Buzzfeed also introduces stories without coming clean about those stories’ connections to advertising. On his popular blog, “The Dish,” Andrew Sullivan writes of Buzzfeed’s unethical mixing of editorial and advertising content. As he puts it in his piece “Guess Which Buzzfeed Piece is an Ad,” some Buzzfeed posts are “sponsored” by advertisers—it is sometimes unclear until halfway through the article that you are reading a carefully constructed ad. The sell is so soft it’s hard to notice. Sullivan points specifically to two Buzzfeed posts about the new Playstation 4. One of the posts is written by Buzzfeed staff and is titled “The Only Post You Need to Read About the Playstation 4”; the other is written by Buzzfeed’s “partner,” Sony Entertainment, and is titled “11 Things You Didn’t Know about Playstation.” The two articles are basically identical in terms of form, structure, and tone. These types of posts are deliberately ambiguous, combining opinion and promotion. And while it’s a clever tactic, it’s not an ethical one. What if Buzzfeed put its resources behind a dangerous product, like cigarettes? Would we be alarmed to see “40 Things We Love about Smoking,” or would we numbly accept it?

When it’s not sneakily selling products, Buzzfeed is telling me what to do and how to feel. There are countless posts like “Can You Make it Through This Post Without Crying?” replete with images of dying gorillas or stock photos of homelessness. Journalism in any form should let the story speak for itself. Buzzfeed too often crams emotions down our throats and orders us to “watch this” or “feel that.” It asks, “are you crying yet?”

But there is perhaps nothing more prominent on Buzzfeed than the endless lists that try to package up childhood memories and other human experiences into neat, meme-littered posts. I admit that I’ve found it fun to read lists that recount the boy bands of the ‘90s that I’ve forgotten or describe things that annoy New Yorkers. The illumination of the everyday is sometimes hilarious and trips down memory lane to the days of Nick Carter and TLC can be silly and fun.

But the incessant flow of these posts, inundating us with images of our generation’s “collective past,” prods the narcissism in all of us, already powerfully manifest on Facebook and Instagram. Every day becomes a “Throwback Thursday” — we get caught up in our own memories, rather than progressing as adults. Furthermore, the assumption that everyone has the same past experiences—we all remember that movie from 1995!—simply doesn’t hold true. Who is Buzzfeed to tell me that, as a girl born in the ‘90s, I must have loved “Felicity”? I hated that show!

I’m not trying to dictate to people what they should enjoy reading. I’m just noting some pernicious qualities to watch out for. Before tearing up at a post or seething with anger at a news story, remember that relevance and impartiality are sometimes casualties in Buzzfeed’s incessant quest to make you feel.

Isabel H. Evans ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is an english concentrator in Adams House.