“His policy has been guided by platform metrics,” reflected Andrew Gauthier, who was one of BuzzFeed’s leading video producers and later worked for Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential campaign. “You always think that evil will come from the villain in the movie, evil, and then you think – oh no, evil can just start with bad jokes and nihilistic behavior that is fueled by positive reinforcement across multiple platforms.”
And then Mr. Gionet’s story is not exactly that of a lonely young man in his room falling into a rabbit hole of videos that poison his worldview. It is the story of a man being rewarded for being a violent white nationalist and receiving the attention and statement for which he is apparently desperate.
We spent a lot of time on BuzzFeed thinking about how to optimize our content for an online audience; he optimized himself.
When he was arrested in Scottsdale, Arizona, last month for spreading an apple in the eyes of a security guard, an officer reported that Mr. Gionet “informed me that he was an ‘influencer’ and had many followers on social media,” according to with a police report. He was released on bail, said a Scottsdale police spokesman, and is awaiting trial. However, at the Capitol, he shouted “ACAF” – All the police are friends.
His story leaves me wondering what kind of blame those of us who pioneered the use of social media to provide information deserve at this point. Do we, together with the creators of these platforms, help to open Pandora’s box?
I did not work directly with Mr. Gionet. But in 2012, I hired a writer named Benny Johnson, who was cultivating a voice that mixed knowledge of social media and right-wing politics. I mistakenly thought his policy at that time was just conservative. And I imagined it thriving, as conservative writers have done for generations in mainstream newsrooms, where they share their colleagues’ interest in finding common facts.
It took me a while to realize that his interests were not journalistic, or even ideological, but aesthetic, excited by the images of raw power. In the tradition of authoritarian propagandists, he was impressed by the neoclassical buildings, the weapons and, later, the crowds of Donald Trump. And, after we fired him for plagiarism in 2014, he went on to lead the content arm of Trump’s youth wing, Turning Point USA, and present a program on Newsmax. Last week, he was rooting for attempts to overthrow the election (although he backed down when the violence started and later blamed leftists for it). He is also selling his skills in the “viral political narrative” where we work together on BuzzFeed for a generation of new right-wing figures like Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who gained attention for promising to bring her gun to work in Congress. (Neither Mr. Gionet nor Mr. Johnson responded to the questions by email.)