Shortly after enacting extensive layoffs at HuffPost, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has a bold new solution for fixing social media: artificial intelligence. Sorry, by “bold new solution” we actually meant “same solution every other CEO is proposing for every other problem currently facing humanity.” Our mistake!

So what should BuzzFeed do to regain its onetime foothold in internet culture? Start its own social network, of course. Such a prospect was teased earlier this month, after Semafor—the scoopy news site run by former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief Ben Smith—got hold of a leaked Slack message from BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti.

At the end of a long manifesto about what’s broken about today’s biggest social media platforms, BuzzFeed Founder and CEO Jonah Peretti revealed that the company is working on a new social media platform that uses human curation rather than algorithms “that brings joy and playfulness back to the internet.”

BuzzFeed is stepping into the social media arena with a new platform designed to counteract the negativity prevalent in today’s digital landscape. The platform, potentially named “Island,” aims to provide users with a refuge from the algorithm-driven gloom that dominates mainstream social media platforms like Instagram,

He outlines how companies like Meta and TikTok prioritize the judgment of AI algorithms rather than the thoughts of their employees, leading to the proliferation of content that “elicits the most compulsive and predictable response from the human brain.

In an open letter, CEO Jonah Peretti calls out TikTok and Meta for prioritizing AI tech over content and says people miss the mid-2010s "'beer and wine' era of the internet."