(BuzzFeed employees at the company's headquarters in New York.Thomson Reuters)
BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, predicted in a year-end memo to his staff Thursday that so-called fake news would thrive more than ever in 2017.
"Fake news will become more sophisticated, and fake, ambiguous, and spun-up stories will spread widely," Smith said in the memo, which was obtained by Business Insider.
Smith continued: "Hoaxes will have higher production value. It is, for instance, getting easier and easier to create video of someone saying something he or she never said — a tool both for fake news and false denials."
Smith warned that "powerful filter bubbles will drive competing narratives from parallel universes of facts."
"In one recent instance that seems a sign of things to come, a Jewish family harassed after a bullshit report that they had gotten a Christmas event canceled were the subject of what apears [sic] to be an overdone — and mega-viral — claim that they 'fled,'" he wrote, referring to a story that was widely spread last week in left-leaning circles.
The BuzzFeed editor said he was "hopeful," nevertheless, because "audiences are growing more aware of this story, more interested in it, and more able to navigate information."
"We are better than anyone at understanding how stories travel and the role platforms play, at telling these stories clearly and accurately and at debunking the false ones," he said. "We should own this story on every beat."
In his year-end memo, Smith touched on numerous other topics, including how the website would cover President-elect Donald Trump.
Here's the memo in full:
Hey all,
I'm writing to wish you a happy new year and to give you some fairly abstract thoughts and predictions about how we are going to cover the news next year in the U.S. and around the world. I think these will apply pretty much regardless of what you cover, and hope you’ll take a minute to think about how they might:
1) The information environment itself will become even more central to our coverage:
Fake news will become more sophisticated, and fake, ambiguous, and spun-up stories will spread widely. Hoaxes will have higher production value. It is, for instance, getting easier and easier to create video of someone saying something he or she never said — a tool both for fake news and false denials.
And powerful filter bubbles will drive competing narratives from parallel universes of facts. In one recent instance that seems a sign of things to come, a Jewish family harassed after a bullshit report that they had gotten a Christmas event canceled were the subject of what apears to be an overdone — and mega-viral — claim that they “fled.”