‘Facebook Was Like a Democratic Institution’: Ben Smith Says There Was ‘Explicit Goal’ to Get Obama Elected
Former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief and New York Times columnist Ben Smith told MSNBC host Alex Wagner on Tuesday that Facebook was “like a Democratic institution” during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and that the “explicit goal” of the “early internet scene” was in many ways to get Obama elected.
Smith — who left the New York Times in 2022 to co-found the news website Semafor — said that while researching his new book Traffic, the thing that surprised him the most “was going back and seeing that there was this early internet scene where to some degree the explicit goal was to elect Barack Obama.”
“For the Huffington Post, that was part of the point,” he said. “And everyone just took for granted in that world that these were college kids, young people, newly on the internet — they were Democrats.”
Smith then pointed out that Obama even visited Facebook and said, “It sort of went without saying that Facebook was like a Democratic institution.”
The former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief said that while “everybody thought” at the time that the high point of “this new digital world” was “the election of Barack Obama,” looking back it is clear that “the high point, the crowning achievement of this sort of new social media world is the election of Donald Trump” in 2016.
Smith pointed out that some of the “characters” of the early internet, including Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes and Huffington Post co-founder Andrew Breitbart, later went on to invent “these new culture wars” and “in some ways” they “adopted the lessons more fully than most people on the left.” He also said that the new social media tools “turned out to be just perfect for serving this very angry moment” during the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, with Smith pointing to Facebook in particular.
He said that Facebook eventually got “freaked out by it” and “started tweaking its dials to say, ‘Wait, we don’t want people sharing fake stories about Hillary Clinton body doubles. We want like more meaningful stories which people engage with.'”
“And then what that would be was like a Donald Trump meme and you replying ‘kill yourself’ in the comments and then that being shared to everybody because the algorithm has decided that you are deeply engaged,” he concluded.
Watch above via MSNBC.
