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FROM checking why you have a tickle in your throat to searching for why your eye is twitching - we're all guilty of googling our health symptoms.

However, for some people, they become completely consumed by health anxiety after excessively searching for a likely diagnosis.

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This has been dubbed "cyberchondria" - when you constantly surf the internet to self-diagnose real or imagined health problems.

And the condition is said to be costing the NHS millions in wasted appointments.

Here, associate professor Jill Newby and psychology lecturer Eoin McElroy from the University of Leicester write for The Conversation about what cyberchondria really is and what to do if you have it...

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The term cyberchondria describes the anxiety we experience as a result of excessive web searches about symptoms or diseases.

Its not an official diagnosis, but is an obvious play on the word hypochondria, now known as health anxiety. Its obsessional worrying about health, online.

Some argue cyberchondria is simply a modern form of health anxiety.

But studies show even people who dont normally worry about their health can see their concerns spiral after conducting an initial web search.

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Cyberchondria is when searching is:

If this sounds like you, theres help.

We tested whether an online treatment program helped reduce cyberchondria in 41 people with severe health anxiety.

We compared how well it worked compared with a control group of 41 people who learned about general (not health-related) anxiety and stress management online.

The online treatment is based on cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), which involves learning more helpful ways of thinking and behaving.

Participants completed six online CBT modules over 12 weeks, and had phone support from a psychologist.

Are you a hypochondriac?

TheNHSlists hypochondria as "health anxiety".

According to the health organisation, it is commonly listed as having the following symptoms:

Anxiety itself can cause symptoms like headaches or a racing heartbeat, and you may mistake these for signs of illness.

The treatment explained how excessive web searching can become a problem, how to search about health effectively, and practical tools to prevent and stop it (see a summary of those tips below).

We found the online treatment was more effective at reducing cyberchondria than the control group.

It helped reduce the frequency of online searches, how upsetting the searching was, and improved participants ability to control their searching.

Importantly, these behavioural changes were linked to improvements in health anxiety.

Although we dont know whether the program simply reduced or completely eliminated cyberchondria, these findings show if youre feeling anxious about your health, you can use our practical strategies to reduce anxiety-provoking and excessive online searching about health.

Here are our top tips from the treatment program:

1. Be aware of your searching

Dont just search on auto-pilot.

Take note of when, where, how often, and what you are searching about.

Keep track of this for several days so you can spot the warning signs and high-risk times for when youre more likely to get stuck in excessive searching.

Then you can make a plan to do other things at those times.

2. Understand how web searches work

Web search algorithms are mysterious beasts.

But top search results are not necessarily the most likely explanation for your symptoms.

Top search results are often click-bait the rare, but fascinating and horrific stories about illness we cant help clicking on (not the boring stuff)

3. Be smart about how you search

Limit yourself to websites with reliable, high quality, balanced information such as government-run websites and/or those written by medical professionals.

Stay away from blogs, forums, testimonials or social media.

4. Challenge your thoughts by thinking of alternative explanations for your symptoms

For example, even though you think your eye twitch might be motor neuron disease, what about a much more likely explanation, such as staring at the computer screen too much.

5. Use other strategies to cut down, and prevent you from searching

Focus on scheduling these activities at your high-risk times.

These can be absorbing activities that take your focus and can distract you; or you can use relaxation strategies to calm your mind and body.

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6. Surf the urge

Rather than searching straight away when you feel the urge to search about your symptoms, put it off for a bit, and see how the urge to search reduces over time.

And if those dont help, consult a doctor or psychologist.

View original post here:
Do you have cyberchondria? The 4 signs your health anxiety is getting out of control - The Sun

A father in the Philippines holds his child, who was immunized for measles. Jason Beaubien/NPR hide caption

A father in the Philippines holds his child, who was immunized for measles.

After decades of progress against one of the most contagious human viruses, the world is seeing measles stage a slow, steady comeback.

The World Health Organization and the CDC say in a new report that there were nearly 10 million cases of measles last year, with outbreaks on every continent.

An estimated 140,000 people died from measles in 2018, WHO says, up from an all-time low of 90,000 in 2016.

And so far 2019 has been even worse.

Don't see the graphic above? Click here.

In Samoa a measles outbreak has shut down that nation's schools indefinitely. Government offices in the Pacific island nation have been closed for the last two days as part of a national immunization drive. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, measles has claimed more than 5,000 lives since January as many people as have died in that country's ongoing Ebola outbreak.

"In 2018 there's been an increase in both the cases and the deaths that have occurred from measles. In other words, we're backsliding," says Kate O'Brien, WHO's top executive on immunization, speaking in a video statement accompanying the new report.

"The reason we're having increases in cases and deaths of measles has to do fundamentally with people not getting vaccinated."

There are various reasons for the drop-off. O'Brien denounces misinformation about vaccines that's gained traction on some social media networks. In other places the health systems are so poor that vaccines simply don't reach the kids who need them.

To halt a measles outbreak in any given community, health officials say they need to get 95% of the population immunized against the virus.

Xavier Crespin, UNICEF's chief of health in the Democratic Republic of Congo, says only 50% of Congolese kids have had measles shots through routine childhood checkups. When measles outbreaks flare up, Crespin says, armed conflicts in parts of the country make it extremely difficult to respond.

"Because of the security issue, we cannot go everywhere we need to go," Crespin says from the capital Kinshasa. "There are some hot spot measles areas but it is very difficult for local teams to move toward these areas and to vaccinate children."

Most measles deaths are among children under age 5. Kids tend to get more complications than adults if they contract the disease. A common cause of death is when children who catch measles go on to develop pneumonia.

And because measles is so contagious the virus can live in the air for two hours after someone who is sick coughs or sneezes --it's one of the first diseases to make a comeback when health systems start to break down. "Measles is the canary in the coal mine," says Robert Linkins, head of the Accelerated Disease Control and Surveillance Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says the current resurgence of measles reveals problems in basic health-care delivery systems.

"[Measles] indicates that there are problems in a community with other vaccine preventable disease coverage," he says. "And in many respects, it's a signal that we've got to pay more attention to where measles is occurring."

And currently that is all around the world.

See the article here:
Measles Cases Around The World Show A Sharp Spike In Past Two Years : Goats and Soda - NPR

Breaking habits is hard. We all know this, whether weve failed our latest diet (again), or felt the pull to refresh our Instagram feed instead of making progress on a work project that is past due.This is largely because we are constantly barraged by stimuli engineered to make us craveand consume, stimuli that hijack the reward-based learning systemin our brains designed initially for survival.

Put simply, reward-based learning involves a trigger (for example, the feeling of hunger), followed by a behavior (eating food), and a reward (feeling sated). We want to do more of the things that feel good and less of the things that feel bad or stressful. These three components (trigger, behavior, and reward) show up every time we smoke a cigarette or eat a cupcake. This is especially true at work. Each time we try to soothe ourselves from a taxing assignment we reinforce the reward, to the point where unhealthy distractions can become habits.

So why cant we just control ourselves and decide to replace bad habits with good ones? The doctrine of self-control has been promulgated for decades, despite the fact that researchers at Yale and elsewhere have shown that the brain networks associated with self-control (e.g. the prefrontal cortex) are the first to go offline when faced with triggers such as stress. Still, in medical school, I was taught to pass self-control rhetoric on to my patients. Need to lose weight? Quit eating junk food. Trying to quit smoking? Stop cold turkey or use a nicotine replacement.

When I started actually practicing medicine, however, I quickly learned that it doesnt work this way in real life.

Self-control theories have missed something critical: reward-based learning is based on rewards, not behaviors. How rewarding a behavior is drives how likely we are to repeat that behavior in the future, and this is why self-control as an approach to breaking habits often fails.

Over the past 20 years, Ive researched ways to create a better method by bringing the scientific and clinical practices together. My time spent studying the behavioral neuroscience of how habits form, and the best way to tackle them, helped me find a surprisingly natural way to do this: mindfulness.

By using mindfulness training to make people more aware of the reward reinforcing their behavior, I can help them tap into what is driving their habit in the first place. Once this happens, they are more easily able to change their association with the reward from a positive one to a more accurate (and often negative) one.

When someone joins our quit smoking program, for example, the first thing I have them do is pay attention while theyre smoking. They often give me a quizzical look, because theyre expecting me to tell them to do something other than smoke, like eat candy as a substitute when they have a craving. But because a reward drives future behavior, and not the behavior itself, I have my clients pay attention to what it tastes and feels like when they smoke. The goal is to make the patient aware of the reward value, or the level of positive reaffirmation they are getting from the habit they want to change. The higher the value, the more likely they are to repeat the behavior.

I see the same thing happen over and over again the reward value of the habit decreases because it isnt as gratifying as people remember. One client of mine, for instance, thought the act of smoking made her look cool as a teenager. Even though that motivation had dissipated in her adulthood, her brain still associated positive feelings with smoking. Hence, her reward value was high. When that same client started paying attention as she smoked, she realized that cigarettes taste bad, commenting, Smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals. Yuck. This helped her brain update the reward value of her habit. She was able to get accurate information about how smoking feels right now, which then helped her become disenchanted with the process.

After seeing how effective this practice was with my clients, I decided to test it even further. My lab and I developed three apps that deliver this same kind of mindfulness training to anyone with a smartphone via short sequential lessons over a period of three to four weeks. The apps are designed to help people break bad habits such as smoking, overeating, and anxiety (which oddly enough, is driven by the same habit loops as the other two behaviors).

Tens of thousands of people from around the world have used these apps, and my lab has published a number of studies showing significant, clinically meaningful results: 5x the smoking quit rates of gold standard treatment, 40% reductions in craving-related eating, and a 63% reduction in anxiety. In a recent randomized controlled trial, we even found that our mindfulness app for smoking cessation taught users how to better control the part of their brain that gets over-activated by smoking cues and chocolate cravings.

While our research has been focused primarily on changing health-related habits, we believe it is highly relevant to the workplace. Our strategy can help workers up their productivity, morale, and overall performance by teaching them how to overcome the habits that may be holding them back from thriving. Heres how to get started:

Similar to the advice I give to people in my outpatient clinic, the first step to breaking a habit (no matter what it is) is to figure out your triggers. If the habit is procrastination or stress eating at work, for example, pay attention to the circumstances surrounding you when you do those things. Do you have a big project youre trying to avoid? Do you have too much on your plate to manage?

Once you know your triggers, try to identify the behaviors you engage in when you are acting out. Do you check social media instead of doing work? Do you snack on sweets during challenging assignments? You must be able to name the actions you turn to for comfort or peace of mind before you can evaluate their reward values.

The next step is to clearly link up action and outcome. Remember my patient who struggled to quit smoking? Just like I asked her to pay attention to the act of smoking, I am asking you to pay attention to how you feel when you partake in your habit.

If you stress eat, how does it feel to eat junk food when you arent hungry? How does what you eat impact the state of your mind, and body, fifteen minutes after the fact? If you procrastinate, what do you get from surfing the internet for pictures of cute puppies? How rewarding is it in the moment, especially when you realize that it isnt helping you get your work done?

Remember your answers to these questions, or write them down to help solidify them in your mind.

This new awareness you have developed will help your brain accurately update the reward value of the habit you want to break. You will begin to see that X behavior leads to Y consequences, and often, those consequences are holding you back from reaching your full potential.

The final step to creating sustainable, positive habit change is to find a new reward that is more rewarding than the existing behavior. The brain is always looking for that bigger, better offer.

Imagine you are trying to break a bad habit like stress eating at work, and willpower hasnt quite worked out for you. What if, instead of indulging in your candy craving to counteract a negative emotion, you substituted it with curiosity about why you are having that craving in the first place, and what it feels like in your body and your mind?

The reward value of curiosity (opening yourself up) is tangibly different than stress eating (closing yourself down) in this instance. Ultimately, curiosity feels better in the moment and is much more enjoyable than the rumination that often occurs after giving into a bad habit.

To tap into their curiosity, I teach my patients a simple mantra: Hmmmm. As in, be curious about your feelings. What does this craving feel like when it first arrives, before I have decided to indulge it?

People often learn, pretty quickly, that cravings are made up of physical sensations and thoughts, and that these come and go. Being curious helps them acknowledge those sensations without acting on them. In other words, they can ride the wave of a craving out by naming and sitting with the thoughts and feelings that arise in their bodies and minds from moment to moment until those moments pass.

If youre curious to see how well this might work for you, now is a good time to give it a try.

The next time you find yourself indulging in a bad habit, take a moment to pause and consider using mindfulness to help you overcome it. Your behaviors may not change immediately but stick with it. If you can hack your mind using our methods, you will eventually be able to break free of unwanted habits and comfortably watch your cravings pass by.

Read the original here:
How to Break Up with Your Bad Habits - Harvard Business Review

The scam ads Mr Forrest is railing against are against Facebook's advertising guidelines. However, the social media company, and others, including Google and Twitter, have found it difficult to stamp out scam ads as the fraudulent actors continue to adapt their methods and technology each time the companies try to stop them.

A Facebook spokeswoman said the social media giant was investing in a scaled technology to prevent these types of scams.

"We now have more than 35,000 people working on safety and security, and our security budget today is greater than the entire revenue of our company at the time of our IPO," she said.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.Bloomberg

"We take action to ensure the integrity of our site. This means not just suspending and deleting accounts, pages, and ads, but considering taking further legal action in certain instances against those responsible for violating our rules."

The spokeswoman said Facebook had built detection models specifically for what it calls "celeb-bait", where it takes on what it is learning about the change tactics of groups using the scam ads.

We do not allow these scams on our services and we take swift action to remove them as soon as we become aware. These scammers use sophisticated cloaking technology to mask content so that it shows different versions to our ad review systems than it does to people," she said.

"This is a clear violation of our policies as ads must not use tactics intended to circumvent our ad review process or other enforcement systems."

Mr Forrest said Facebook and other companies were not doing enough to combat scams and they needed to be held to the same standards as advertisements that would run in a newspaper or on a radio network or TV station.

"Weve seen these huge social media companies excavate trust because people like the lady who got scammed out of her entire life savings trust the fact that the institution is big, therefore they must come under the principles of proper governance, that theyre using Andrew Forrests face and name, then surely they must have his permission, they must be following all the proper regulations," he said.

As part of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Digital Platforms Inquiry, the competition watchdog has recommended a new ombudsman to help people resolve complaints with the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter over a number of issues, including fraudulent advertising.

ACCC boss Rod Sims.AFR

The inquiry found the number of scams on social media reported to the ACCC between 2014 and 2018 surged by 188 per cent, and losses incurred by people being defrauded had jumped 165 per cent.

The ACCC highlighted the example of the week of May 6, 2019, when its Scamwatch received 165 reports where Facebook was mentioned with estimated losses of $70,000.

Its report says: "These scams occur in a number of different ways, including advertising displayed on Google or Facebook, or on websites that are part of Googles or Facebooks advertising networks, that contain false representations and scam content.

"This is damaging for businesses that inadvertently display these advertisements, and for consumers who fall victim to these scams and suffer both financial and non-financial loss."

Seven West Media chairman Kerry Stokes this month told reporters he had spoken to Mr Forrest about the scam ads using his image.

"If you did that in your newspaper, or if I did that in our newspaper, or if we did that on television, wed be in court ... misleading conduct and everything. But, here they are, running these ads on these platforms, taking advantage of people who should not be taken advantage of," Mr Stokes said.

"If that was an Australian company, that just wouldnt happen. If I did that at Seven, youd have your headlines across all the papers saying what scumbags we were. That doesnt happen with them."

Go here to see the original:
Forrest urges government to treat tech giants as publishers - The Australian Financial Review

Peretti with Dao Nguyen, now BuzzFeeds publisher, in 2013. Photo: Peter Yang/August

As the decade began, there were reasons to be optimistic: America had elected its first black president, and despite a global recession just two years earlier, the world hadnt cascaded into total financial collapse. Obamacare, for all its flaws, was passed, and then came the Iran deal and the Paris climate accords. Sure, there were danger signs: the anger of the tea party, the slow hollowing out of legacy news media, a troubling sense that somehow the bankers got away with it. But then maybe the immediacy of social media gave some hope, at least if you listened to the chatter of the bright young kids in the Bay Area trying to build a new kind of unmediated citizenship. Maybe every day celebrity, post-gatekeeper, would change the world for the better. Some of that happened. But we also ended up with the alt-right and Donald Trump, inequality, impeachment, and debilitating FOMO. How did we get here? Throughout this week, we will be publishing long talks with six people who helped shape the decade and were shaped by it to hear what theyve learned.Read them all here.

I heard WeGrow, the preschool, is being shut down, Jonah Peretti says, sitting in a conference room in BuzzFeeds New York offices. How do you explain that to your 4-year-old? He affects a gently parental tone: Theres this guy Adam Neumann, and hes very charismatic

Like Neumann, Peretti took money from the Japanese investment giant SoftBank not the companys Saudi-backed Vision Fund, hes careful to clarify early in his start-ups life. Unlike WeWork, though, BuzzFeed has managed to keep its head above water for 13 years in an industry with prospects much worse than real estates. Since its founding in 2006 and especially since the creation of the BuzzFeed News division in 2012, BuzzFeed has led the transformation of a news-media industry threatened by tech megaplatforms, private-equity vultures, fickle readers, and declining ad sales. It has pioneered new formats and business models, all while breaking major national stories like that of the infamous Steele dossier. (Even the New York Times has taken notice: Its 2014 Innovation Report looked to BuzzFeed as a model of web-publishing excellence, and Dean Baquet recently remarked on its substantial journalistic impact.) But itll probably always be known for the memes. The audience still isnt bored of quizzes, Peretti says.

When did you first see the dress?I was out in a restaurant, and I was trying to be polite and not look at my phone and hanging out with my friends. And my phone was vibrating, and people were like, Oh my God. The restaurant I was in, literally all the waiters were looking at it. People were passing it around.

How long did that last? The next morning, we just ran into a stranger. They were like, Oh, that was so yesterday. But the dress was a kind of perfect thing to catch fire at that moment. The internet was less polarized and politicized, and it had shifted to mobile fully so people were looking at mobile devices. With the dress, if you saw it on your phone and you were with people, you could hold the phone up and say, What color is this? Plus, in the early days of BuzzFeed, our traffic would die in the evening because people would watch television or go out with their friends. Now, with mobile, we see prime time for our content as the same as prime time for television. People are sharing content and looking at content later.

Have the conditions changed such that something like the dress couldnt happen again? I think its harder. One reason is I think it made Facebook a little uncomfortable. The algorithm was like, This is the piece of content everyone in the world should see. I think that scared Facebook a little bit, that there could be a publisher that promotes a piece of content that then their algorithm feels like it needs to show to everyone in the world. Today, theres a fear of viral content you see this in China to an even greater extent. The Chinese government is very afraid of things that go viral, because its something that they cant control. And I think even in the U.S. now, theres more of a moment of trying to control the internet. Ironically, that has led to much more microtargeting, where instead of having one thing that everyone in the world sees, we have personalized content for each individual, and keep people more in their lanes and in their bubbles, and not have as much entertainment that cuts across the entire social network or the entire web. In the long run, I think thats led to things like more separatist movements around the world, more polarization.

How has media coverage of politics changed since 2008, when you made your mark as one of the founders of the Huffington Post?At Huffington Post, it was less about scoops and journalism. We were more of an aggregator, and we noticed at the time that Digg was a big source of traffic. During the primaries, when Obama and Hillary Clinton were competing, one of the things that was kind of shocking to me was how the Digg community was having this huge impact. When there was a story that was pro-Obama, it would quickly get voted at the top of Digg because Diggs community liked Obama. And when there was a story that was pro-Hillary or that talked about Hillary in a positive light, it would get down-voted and buried and never make it in front of Digg. Some media outlets started to realize that, and they were starting to write content for Digg Oh, Obama was amazing, and then, boom, 40,000 views to your posts. That to me felt like an early-warning sign of how media was changing, that a community and an algorithm combined to make it so that Hillary couldnt win the primary and Obama could. I think that dynamic really was partly why Obama was able to win and then ultimately become president.

Over time, that dynamic has gotten bigger and bigger. Its why Bloombergs presidential campaign probably wont go anywhere. Its harder if youre a boring centrist who doesnt have a strong, passionate community obsessed with you and a message that gets torqued by algorithms because it is exciting or crazy or interesting or extreme or novel. Obama, I think, was this really interesting case because he was very good with positive messages, but he also was novel as the first black major-party nominee. Over time, youre seeing these trends continue, where having a fanatical fandom behind you and a message that drives engagement on platforms gives you an advantage if youre trying to run for president.

It sounds like youre making an argument that the dress and its subsequent success, and the reaction of platforms like Facebook pushing for further microtargeting, ultimately resulted in Trump.I mean, I think Trump is part of it, but theres a larger macrotrend that microtargeting is both a cause and a result of. The internet has had this first-order effect of giving everyone a voice and connecting the world. Now, its having this second-order effect that we are still trying to understand. Is it that globalism is going to be replaced with lots of nationalistic movements? And one inflection point was Trump being elected. Joyful, positive content started to be replaced with critical, negative content. A lot of the content that started to go viral was more polarizing and fighting.

But youre also saying that shift had already been in place before Trump was nominated or elected. And in fact, you could argue the more aggressive stuff, the less joyful stuff, was part of what pushed him to the nomination.One shift after the dress was platforms like Facebook wanting to take more control of their platform. Even before Trump, Facebook started to become more like Netflix, where it wasnt that your friend shared this content with you, its that youve engaged with Beyonc content before; and when a page that you follow posts something about Beyonc, it gets matched with you and put into your feed. Its a recommendation algorithm showing you things similar to things youve seen before, and the same on the ad side, getting targeted.

It was frustrating for BuzzFeed editors, to be honest, because, at the time, they would make content and judge whether theyre doing a good job by how much that content reached new people and was shared to reach new audiences. That became a smaller and smaller percentage of the traffic that we would get to any post. And a larger and larger percentage was just based on matching and targeting and preferences. So every Taylor Swift post would get about the same number of views and reach the same kind of people. The internet became less about people sharing with each other and less people powered, and more powered by an algorithm thats matching content to people based on their interests.

You guys had success with fairly microtargeted content before this shift started to happen, though, didnt you? There was a year and a half there when lists like How You Can Tell Youre From Princeton, New Jersey, Where Im From, or whatever were doing really well for BuzzFeed. But when you look at a post like Signs Youre Raised by Asian Immigrant Parents, we could see that half of the people reading it werent Asian. I think what ended up happening is that, over time, people realized you could do the same thing but have it be about a negative view of other people. Like, This is who we are, and everyone else is threatening us. Or, You should be fearful of us.

Why has the right has been so particularly good at owning social media in a way the liberals and the left havent been able to?I think there are a few reasons. One is that Steve Bannon was trying to use Breitbart to get Trump elected. In the book Devils Bargain, theres a passage that says that when Breitbart was getting off the ground, I spoke to Bannon which I dont remember because, at that time, who knew who Steve Bannon was? And he was like, I love the idea that it was about community, not about traffic. I was like, Oh my God, I inspired Steve Bannon.

If you were in charge of the vast left-wing-media cabal, what would the left do to make itself more viral?Basically, dont burden yourself with truth. Just make memes that participate in the cultural wars.

You worked with Andrew Breitbart at the Huffington Post, too, right? I did, yeah.

You could make a good case that Breitbart was the publication that defined the 2016 election. Yeah. The left-wing sites and centrist sites were all linking to each other and talking to each other, the left-wing sites were being checked by these mainstream sites, and the readership was kind of between the two. But Breitbart was kind of off in its own space, creating its own reality. When Trump gave his first speeches, immigration wasnt the biggest thing he talked about, but he got good reactions from the crowd and, almost like a stand-up comic or musician, he learned to change based on that. Breitbart was doing the same thing online, testing messages and seeing what kinds of things got engagement.

Isnt that what everyone in media is doing?BuzzFeeds not trying to get anyone elected. The mainstream media and the left-wing media keep each other in check, and Fox News and Breitbart are kind of out there on their own. And they are much more focused on political outcomes, which is not really the case with the mainstream media and even the left-wing media. Theres a feeling of, Well, its not fair because the right can meme Trump to the presidency with things that are inaccurate, and then the left feels like, Oh, if I do something, then the New York Times is going to write an article that says this is inaccurate or this or that or the other. And then all my friends are going to read that article, you know?

Can we talk about the publication of the Steele dossier in that context? Im wondering about the decision to publish an unredacted document over the objections of traditional media gatekeepers. Its a philosophical difference. In the era of industrial media newspapers, broadcast television the media thought of itself as a gatekeeper and was a gatekeeper. There were good things about that model. Now, with the internet, information can go viral unchecked by anyone, just uploaded to a platform. We live in a totally different environment, where information can be peer-to-peer, it can be spread to groups. The platforms would love it if they had to spend no money on media or content and if users just put up all media and content. And if you think of yourself as a gatekeeper, youre deluding yourself. So the philosophical difference is that we see our role is to not keep information from people. We see our role as to help them understand the information thats circulating, help them understand information that is circulating at the highest levels of government or that is spreading across the internet in the form of a hoax or fake news.

Ive always been sort of tickled by the fact that Peter Kaplan was the first person you went to when you were thinking about starting BuzzFeed News. He wasnt a new-model thinker about news on the internet; hes an old-school lion. What was it about Peter that made you want him to run BuzzFeed News?I had met him a couple times, and Ken Lerer knew him for a long time. I asked Peter for advice: You know, the 2012 elections coming up. We want to get into news. We have this vision of social content, which was a new thing at the time, and were doing it for entertainment and cute animals and internet memes, but now people are starting to share news. What do you recommend? And he said, Well, you should have smart people whose writing you like come to BuzzFeed and just give a pitch to your editors and writers around 12 of us at the time about what they would do and how they would cover the election. And he did one first, and I was like, Why dont you just do it? That was great.

What was his pitch?He said that every election cycle, a news source emerges and defines itself with its coverage. And, even though BuzzFeed had only done the cute kittens and internet memes, that this was going to be a big election and the opportunity to get really great reporters who will break stories that will go everywhere on social media and could put us on the map as a news organization. The time to do it was in this election cycle. I said, You should do it. And hes like, Oh, I got kids in college, and he was working at a big job at Cond Nast, and so he was like, Theres this guy Ben Smith. You know, he used to have it. You should talk to him. And so Ben came. And he still had it.

Arguably, the 2012 election was when BuzzFeed emerged as a news organization, and the Boston Marathon bombing came the year after. A lot of people have suggested it was the moment when BuzzFeeds news operation came into its own, and there was a sense that it knew what it was doing better than anybody. It seemed surprising. Was it surprising for you?Well, the big surprise for me was that this horrific thing happens in Boston and we immediately saw our front-page traffic go up. At the time, BuzzFeed was really mostly known for lists and quizzes and cute animals, and the pundit class was basically saying, People dont want news from BuzzFeed. They want news on a serious news site, and you have all this entertainment content. And yet our audience, our millennial audience, was saying, Oh, I read BuzzFeed every day. I wonder what they are saying or what they can tell me about whats happening in this Boston thing. We were moving to an environment where news and entertainment were mixed together more and where people were used to consuming content in these feeds.

I was reading something you wrote on BuzzFeed around this time, about whether the reader should buy Facebook stock, and it contained this explanation of the history of the Internet moving from portals like AOL to search engines to social media. Was the 2010s the decade of social?Yeah. The internet started out with not a very deep metric for engagement, which is impressions. The first advertising on the internet was banner ads, and you couldnt really tell if anyone saw them or not. It was just, Oh, this image was served a bunch of times. That built Yahoo and was how a lot of publishing worked. Then you saw that Google figured out you could actually look at whether someone clicked. What was a kind of superficial metric of impressions turned into a deeper metric of clicks. Then Facebook was able to say, Well, sharing is an even deeper connection because youre saying something that isnt just worth clicking on for yourself. That added social validation and the people in your life to the internet. So it went from being solitary to being a group thing and social thing.

It also involves a lot of surveillance.To me, the promise of it is not just surveillance of people to make more money off them. The promise of it is, its like a live musician who performs at a concert is going to get the energy from the crowd, and theyre going to have that back-and-forth sense of whats happening. To me, thats the biggest difference between making anything, where you make a product and then it just gets sent out to the masses, and working on the internet, where you make something and immediately theres all these comments and people on Twitter saying things and its getting shared, maybe a lot, maybe a little. You immediately realize that what you created is being perceived and understood a certain way by different people, and then that affects what you write the next time. Thats had a really fundamental shift on how content is made and how media companies think about, you know, making content.

Its like live performance in the sense that youre riffing with the audience. If youre a stand-up comic and you have a joke and you tell it and no one laughs, you say, Oh, I got to rework that joke. And you try it a different way and you add a little thing, and then you notice, Oh, they laughed. They laughed at the wrong part. Why was that? Oh, maybe thats because theres another thing thats funny in it. And then you end up with a great joke. And I think that doesnt make you a bad stand-up comic; that makes you a good stand-up comic, just so long as you dont just pander to the audience, that you actually have a voice or a vision or something you want to communicate.

Specifically, how do you think that has affected news journalism? Do you think the way journalists write is different now from the way it was before they had that kind of immediate back-and-forth and feedback?So theres a sense of being more accountable to the audience. You can no longer write a long, boring story and imagine that everyone reads it just cause it was in the New York Times. And I think a lot of the biggest stories are now being driven by the online reaction. I dont think the Me Too movement is just a heroic act of journalism; its that every time theres a story, the online distribution of that story results in new victims and new sources emerging, and then it creates a new urgency for the subjects of the story who are no longer able to keep their jobs or to avoid scrutiny.

Is the Stanford Jane Doe impact statement an example of a story that was generated out of that kind of back-and-forth?She provided the letter to us because she had read Katie J.M. Bakers reporting on sexual abuse on campuses and knew that we had both a great team of reporters who take these issues seriously and a huge global audience that cares about these issues. We have a really young audience, and a lot of young women read BuzzFeed. Sexual abuse on campuses was a big story that wasnt being covered that much when we started to really break a bunch of stories in that area a few years ago. We know what our audience cares about better because, well, theyre online and were online with them and were in that mix.

There are fears that people have that awareness of audience will drive you to stories about the Kardashians or something and not to good journalism. But in many cases, its issues that are urgently important to young people, for example, that are getting covered more by real, serious journalists, and thats because of the internet and the connection with the audience.

How do you do that with the vegetables of news especially local news, city-council meetings, stuff that strikes me as hard to think about in that way?Theres a real crisis in local news, and I dont know what the solution is.The internet favors global news because if you make a piece of content that people can view globally, thats just a much bigger addressable audience than if you make a piece of content that only people in one neighborhood care about. I think having the two-way connection with the audience is still helpful. And maybe thats on Next Door or its on a smaller blog or its on another site. But the challenge is if youre just making money through ads, CPMs, and things like that, how do you make sure you can invest when your addressable audience is so much smaller?

But I mean, theres sort of a deeper question there: What is news? Is news what the editors at the New York Times say is news, or is news what people care about, or is news somewhere in the middle between those two things or the intersection of those two things?

How do you answer that question at BuzzFeed?BuzzFeed Newss slogan is Reporting to you, and its about that connection between really great journalists working in the service of our audience and things that matter to our audience.

Do you think the media screwed up the 2016 election in its coverage?Yes. I mean, part of being the media is screwing up. You know the rough-draft-of-history clich. Youre doing things without knowing what the future holds, and when you look back, its really easy to criticize. The front page of the New York Times, with all of the Hillary email stuff on it, definitely feels in retrospect like it was blown out of proportion. That may have been sexism, that may have been both sidesism. It may have been people underestimating Trumps chance of winning.

Why was Trumps victory missed so badly? It sounds as if you were seeing data demonstrating that Trump was driving way more engagement over Clinton. Why wasnt that an indication hed win?Thinking back to that Digg example, Obama won the presidency probably because the internet had started to become a thing and these social-media dynamics favored him over his main primary challenger. That may have cost Hillary the presidential election as well with Trump. Thats something I dont even think is fully on the radar of the traditional media. But if youre trying to figure out whos going to have a chance at beating the odds or outperforming, understanding these internet dynamics is so important.

There was still a general belief that the mass media and the party system and the voters are going to reject someone who seems so out of line with the norms. But now that hes won, I think everyone is much more aware that maybe a much broader range of possible candidates can win. And if they can light up the algorithms and they have a fan base behind them and they speak in a way that appeals to voters who are not necessarily closely following every political debate, they can win.

It feels to me like Andrew Yang is the candidate who is best aware of this and is building a campaign around it in some ways. Yang feels different than Trump in that hes self-conscious of it. Hes thinking of it like a system and trying to figure out how to use it.

Hes a tool-using animal instead of just completely reactive and instinctive. But in some ways, understanding it can be a disadvantage.

How do you feel about Facebook these days? I think the biggest challenge Facebook has, and YouTube and some of these other platforms have, is that the main way consumers interact with their product is through the content, and they dont actually control any of the content. And so theres these giant companies that make tons of money that have huge cultural impact, and the experience of it is being defined by a bunch of much smaller companies that are all kind of trying to get scrappy and figure out how to make content on the internet in a way thats sustainable.

It felt to me like there was a point when Facebook turned on and then turned off a traffic fire hose. It was somewhere around 2014, 2015, that traffic stopped going off-site to articles and stayed on-site for video. Did you experience it like that?We knew Facebook wanted to do video; they said they wanted to do more video. And we also knew that Facebooks users didnt like video. Wed say, Oh, we have all these great videos. We can put them on Facebook, too. We put them on Facebook, and the audience hated it and they hated it because they were using Facebook for, you know, two-minute check-ins when they had a little break in their day to see what was going on in the world and with their friends. Text is a better thing, more scannable. So we saw, Oh wow, this is an opportunity because video is something that the company is really prioritizing, and it isnt working. And so we need to figure out what format could work. And we tried a lot of experiments and a whole bunch of different areas, and Tasty really emerged out of a bunch of different experiments some with food, some not with food to make audio-optional video, where you didnt need to have sound on that immediately attracts your attention.

This was around the time of the big pivot to video.We started video at BuzzFeed much earlier than a lot of companies that were trying to do this pivot to video. But in the last couple of years, its been more evident to people that video is tough, right? It costs more. Its more difficult. The platforms have a lot more lock-in. Its something that takes a lot of up-front investment, and its funny to me that the companies that have stayed away from video have done better than the companies that have kind of half-assed it and tried to do video and then realized that, Oh, this is expensive. The problem is that the cost was something people didnt think about. They just thought about the CPMs and the advertising. Theyre like, Oh, I get a $10 CPM on my text content, but theyll pay $30 for a video. That means I should pivot to video, and video will be great. And then you get into it, and you start saying, Oh, wait a second, how much does it cost to make the video?

Do you think people didnt understand the underlying economics? They didnt see how it worked?You cant really get how it works because, in a boom period like the last decade, youre creating things ahead of the market. Facebook video doesnt even exist, and then its a thing, and then its a different thing. In the early days, it wasnt that people were dumb and didnt understand that, to run a business, you have to sell the hot dog for more than it costs to make a hot dog. The opportunity was huge but also uncertain, and people were having to build a lot of it and figure out the economics later. Now is later. Now is the time where people have to figure out these economics.

So what comes after video?The big wild card in the next ten years of media is: Will there be a new hardware of some kind? Hardware cycles take longer, but they transform media. When BuzzFeed started, the iPhone didnt exist. Our peak traffic time was during the middle of the day. I used to call it the bored at work network. But the cycle for hardware innovation has basically stalled. There was a Google Glass attempt, and that didnt really go anywhere. And theres, you know, Oculus and VR, which is feeling more like it could be PlayStation or Xbox, where its something thats a big business and popular but not something that everyone uses, not a dominant thing that changes media. So is there going to be some big thing in the next ten years, where youre getting your media in your glasses or in your eye or directly in your brain or something like that? Thats a harder one to predict, and when it breaks through, it has massive implications for many different, different things.

Putting aside hardware, if the 2010s were the decade of social and if weve moved from portals to search to social is a next era visible? The biggest thing opening up now is action in the real world and the internet being fully integrated into peoples lives. This is one commercial example, but we just launched, inside the Tasty app, an integration where you could click a recipe you like and it puts all of the ingredients into your shopping cart, and you can pick it up at a Walmart or have it delivered to your house.

Why is physical the only revenue model thats working right now? Is there something wrong with advertising? No. Advertising works. We want to have a diversified business where you build essentially a flywheel where, when you make a Tasty video, youre getting some advertising revenue, youre getting some sponsorship revenue, youre getting some licensing revenue, people buying products or maybe driving a direct transaction with people buying groceries, where now the Tasty app is integrated into Walmart groceries.

At some point, the question must become Is this still a media company?The thing that makes it a media company is that we make media. Theres nothing inherent in advertising. If you go back, I dont know, 50 years and you have a newspaper, you have advertising, you have subscription revenue, you have the classifieds kind of marketplace, which is a form of advertising, but its more of a marketplace; and then you have the Sunday insert with coupons and shopper marketing stuff, which is like an affiliate-type business thats driving direct transactions. You wouldnt say the newspaper is not a media company.

Im interested in the question of VC investment, too, because its been such a huge part of the story of media in the past ten years. BuzzFeed is obviously a successful venture-backed company. What do you think the effect of venture capital on these companies has been? Has the kind of media we consume been changed by VC funding?VC funding has allowed certain companies to grow a lot faster and take advantage of an opportunity the rise of these big platforms and the ability to build companies that are symbiotic or, at least, getting some benefit from them. I think that VC is not a reliable funder of media. They dip in and out of it, and theyre not really investing that much right now. They prefer pure tech-driven companies, and VCs in general dont like having too many people involved. So I think in the long run, VCs are not the ones really shaping the media industry. They have helped BuzzFeed and Vox and a few other companies seize a moment, but I dont know that VCs are going to be the long-term partners for media.

I want to ask about Benny Johnson, the conservative viral writer who was fired from BuzzFeed in 2014. What do you feel you learned from that experience? I dont know if I learned any big thoughts from that, just that Benny Johnson is a plagiarist.

One reason I ask is that he went on to have a very successful career as a creator of social-media agitprop for places like The Daily Caller. And, as you say, Breitbart and Bannon maybe picked up on some of the insights BuzzFeed had. Do you feel responsible for that? Is there some sense that youve learned all this stuff about communication, but the people who seem to be putting it to best use from a political point of view are people like Johnson or Bannon?Ive always thought its a kind of arrogance to think that your company or whatever youre building by default makes the world a better place. Anything we figure out or anything any company figures out, other people will look at it and study it and try to use it for their own ends.

I want to talk about workplace culture because BuzzFeed was one of the places that mainstreamed the early youthful start-up culture. I imagine you sort of see that as being integral to Buzzfeeds success.I didnt grow up in media, and I never have worked at a big company, really. I knew people who worked at start-ups and at nonprofits and in academic research labs, and so the natural way to start a company was, Oh, lets have an open floor plan, lets give everyone stock options, lets try to think how it should work and lets build toward that. In the very early days of BuzzFeed, we built our CMS, we made all our own content, we built our own ad model with native advertising. We just had this approach of building everything from scratch because the way it worked doesnt make sense. Lets build for that future. That was this start-up DNA. I didnt ever think of the company as being youthful; I just was young, I guess. The people who are excited about working on stuff related to social content tended to be people who were consuming content that way, which was, at that time, just young people, and so we started building the company that way.

It seems there have been growing pains in figuring out how to transfer that kind of culture to a larger, more mature organization. Its been really difficult. Having to do layoffs was something that was a terrible shock to the culture and to the people and to everyone. Its a hard cultural shift to go from, Hey, theres a new platform, and were going to just go make tons of content for it and see what happens and maybe make money later, to Oh, were going to analyze it a little more, weigh it a little more, and then find an interesting partnership to do it. Now we have this foundation that is and a new way of innovating and growing that makes me feel really excited about the future.

BuzzFeed has a union now, too, and obviously you guys are not the only digital-media shop to have unionized. What do you think is driving that?Its a little like what I talked about earlier. I think that, across the culture, the zeitgeist is more about fighting: fighting against power, fighting against power that could be corrupt or could be taking advantage of people. The biggest example of that is Trump. The flip in the way people see the tech platforms and Silicon Valley is another example of it. The feeling of wanting solidarity, wanting to stand up to fight against global warming and to push for a bigger voice in the workplace. All of those things have aligned. Even when people love their workplace or think theyre fairly aligned with the mission of a company, I think theres still that idea of wanting to have solidarity.

It is hard, I think, for founders of companies. I recognize this as a blind spot where founders who started when companies were really small tend to feel like theyre side by side with employees. Im not so motivated by trying to make tons of money. Im motivated by the mission of the company and the people of the company and fighting for the people in the company, so its hard for founders to grasp the idea that theyre going to be in a more adversarial relationship, where theres, like, lawyers negotiating contracts and things like that. When I look at a lot of founders who had unions forming their companies, theyve tended to end up no longer that engaged with a company. You know, Denton, and Arianna, and Shane.

I mean, there were a lot of reasons Nick Denton stopped being engaged with his company. Did you follow the Thiel-Hogan-Gawker stuff at all?I definitely followed it, yeah.

What did you think? The tough thing for Gawker was just that the views on privacy really changed a lot, and there was a feeling, I think, that exposing something more personal and sexual in nature was something the broader public is worried about. The privacy argument banged up against the public has the right to know argument and made the case as a whole less sympathetic to the broader public. When it was revealed that there was a secret funder, that was such a mind-blowing moment.

I guess thats the way the world feels all the time now soap opera, the villain unmasked, or something like that.It makes me think about the Epstein stories now. Theres a sort of view in New York media that is like, Oh, all these conspiracy theorists are so nutty and they believe that theres these billionaires who are, like, running child-prostitution rings and influencing which media companies go out of business and which ones can continue to exist and are controlling academia. And thats all just kinda crazy, you know, QAnon-type stuff. And then youre like, Oh, you know

Im not saying the world is run by billionaires pulling strings in conspiracies. I think the conspiratorially minded people on the internet definitely underestimate the scale of the economy and the scale of different institutions. In my experience, having spent time with various billionaires and leaders, theyre usually as confused as anyone else and just trying to figure out how to, like, make their stuff work. But there are some pretty shocking cases.

*A version of this article appears in the November 25, 2019, issue ofNew York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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