BuzzFeed.

It’s a name all millennials, Gen X’ers, and baby boomers know all too well--unless you’ve been living under a rock, I’m sure you’re aware of BuzzFeed’s site and their clickbait headlines such as: "Does Your Ex Still Think About You? Answer These 5 Questions To Find Out" or "Elsa's Pantsuit in the 'Frozen' Music is Magical AF" that clutter your social media timelines.

For those who aren’t already aware, BuzzFeed is a media company based out of New York City, established in 2006. Their aim is to serve as a lab and place for discussion of online viral content, including everything from pop culture to social activism. Over the years, the site has truly reinvented online media presentation through their normalization of listicles, online quizzes and sensationalist headlines.

As of now, BuzzFeed serves as arguably the most well-known entertainment news media site, and has a staggering yearly revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars--which isn’t surprising, considering the overwhelming monopoly they seem to have over online media content. It’s impossible to surf YouTube without stumbling upon a BuzzFeed video about some new trend or current event; every video gathering millions of views and hundreds of comments. The same is true when surfing virtually any social media platform, especially Facebook. It’s impossible to scroll through your timeline without seeing hundreds of BuzzFeed articles or online quizzes shared by friends and family, who apparently feel it imperative to let all 865 of their friends know what Gossip Girl character they are based on their “food duo” preferences. (Whatever that means.)

And as a young adult myself, I get it. I’m the first to admit that I’ve spent way too much time putting off school work to take quizzes or watch videos--I mean, who cares about an exam when I can find out what Game of Thrones House I’m the perfect combination of? Who cares that I have a paper due in an hour when I can watch Americans try Instagram-worthy Japanese desserts instead?!

But maybe it’s time to take a step back and detach ourselves from all of the relatable content and viral trends to ask ourselves: is this what we really want? Is this what we want our generation to be known for? Is this going to benefit society? (Personally, my answer to all three of these questions is a hard no.)

BuzzFeed is available in seven different languages and has headquarters all over the world. They have a global audience of over 650 million, with over 9 billion content views per month. Those statistics alone and the sheer number of brands who advertise through the site makes it abundantly clear that BuzzFeed is a huge and extremely profitable company. Shouldn’t a company with those resources be able to fund a few serious journalistic endeavors, and be producing well-written, original content? Shouldn’t a company that reaches 3 out of 5 U.S. millennials monthly be reflecting the views and morals of our generation, and report on issues that affect our everyday lives?

Turns out, not so much. The problem that I perceive is that BuzzFeed, as it operates in 2018, is less of a news media organization and more of a well-oiled machine that is designed to spit out nothing but fluff and cheaply produced, biased political content, to grab views and appeal to advertisers.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with fluff or listicles, which are usually harmless and amusing. There's a time and place to discuss 17 times celebrities “trolled” each other on Twitter; there is a time and place for DIY pillows. In journalistic environments, fluff exists as a subsidy of more laborious, researched reporting, and gives readers a break from hard-hitting breaking news stories. BuzzFeed, however, works in a completely opposite way. BuzzFeed seems to be purely made up of entertainment news and content centered around relatively useless social trends. Who really cares why Katy Perry is getting blasted on Twitter? Who really cares about men reading “thirsty” comments?

If I were an alien trying to find out how Earth works, I would assume that Chrissy Teigen is the supreme overlord of the entire world, based on how many articles BuzzFeed publishes about her on a weekly basis. Personally, I’m tired of being force-fed content that has no bearing on current events or the state of the world. I’m tired of reading articles or watching videos about meaningless style trends. I’m tired of being presented with headlines like “35 People Who Just Realized Seth McFarlane Is Actually Hot” as if that has any relevance to my life and what I value.

Every young adult has rolled their eyes after a baby boomer claims millennials are ruining the world. We’re all used to generation-shaming from older people, and usually disregard it as old fogies just being crotchety and mean for no reason. But honestly, I see where the disapproval comes from. You can’t blame older generations for hating us millennials when it seems like all we care about is social media, celebrities, useless trends and clickbait.

Obviously, BuzzFeed is not representative of youth at large, but it’s understandable how that thought prevails. I know for a fact that the youth of the world cares about more than just what’s trending on Twitter this week--younger generations, millennials especially, are more invested in current events and social and political issues than ever. So why are we focusing on fluff, and not on issues or concepts that are pertinent to the world and accurate to what we care about? I don’t care about how my sandwich preferences can somehow predict when I’ll get married. I care about current events, politics, foreign affairs--literally anything else.

Another issue with BuzzFeed stems from how the company operates as a whole: instead of being forced to rely on advertisers for most of their revenue, as most news organizations do, Buzzfeed is designed around producing articles or videos for advertisers. Traffic and virality are the goals, along with shaping articles to better benefit the brands that advertise through them. It’s not unusual for media companies to rely on advertising as its main source of income--that has been a foundation since the early days of journalism, like when newspapers first started selling space and radio first started selling on-air time. What’s unusual is how BuzzFeed prioritizes ads over anything else and is inherently designed around the synthesis of advertising and journalism, or what Andrew Sullivan describes as “an ad agency with some journalistic window dressing.”

Take the BuzzFeed homepage, for example. On first glance, the reader is not bombarded by annoying pop-ups or banner ads, which alludes to the homepage showing only original content. However, in a closer look, one can see that there are actually many ads mixed into the homepage, as with any news organization--they’re just formatted in the same design, font, and imagery so they blend in with original content. These specially-formatted ads do feature a disclaimer immediately below them, identifying them as sponsored content, but is that enough? Most are able to discern sponsored content from original pieces on the website, but there’s no telling what’s what through a tweet or share on social media.

The Advertising Standards Authority of the United Kingdom thought the same way: in 2016, the authority ruled that BuzzFeed failed to make it clear to readers that an article titled “14 Laundry Fails We’ve All Experienced” was actually sponsored content paid for by the UK-based brand, Dylon. They agreed that the homepage and search results displaying the article clearly labeled it as an ad, but said the disclaimer did not take into account that many people might link to the story directly, through a social media share or otherwise.

This kind of native advertising is not inherently evil, as it is proven to perform better for advertisers--but at what point does it become deceptive, and blur the distinction between an ad or an article? I myself have asked this question, after clicking on what I thought was an original article or video, only to find out it was sponsored content.

BuzzFeed is so curated around pleasing advertisers that they have even deleted posts that were critical of brands who regularly advertised through the site. In April 2015, Gawker published that the site had deleted two articles that were critical of Dove Soap and Hasbro, both companies that advertise with BuzzFeed. An internal investigation by BuzzFeed found three additional posts that were deleted for the same reason. The articles were eventually reinstated with an apology from the company, which is great, but begs the question: would they have kept doing it if no one found out? I’m inclined to think they would, especially considering how much money they make from advertisers.

You’d think with that money BuzzFeed would be able to provide readers with thorough, original content, right? They should be able to fund serious journalistic projects or showpieces, right? Again, not so much. The company continues to churn out cheaply-produced, lazily-reported sharebait articles, even where investigative and truthful journalism matters most: in their political content. Surprisingly, their news-related and political stories are what suffer the most from this--they tend to be chock-full of sensationalist words and pictures, and are devoid of context or a deeper meaning.

Take, for example, that one time BuzzFeed published the 35-page Trump dossier, a document full of unverified claims alluding to a Russian collusion. The fact that any news media organization would publish such a document, knowing that the information is unverified and could be false, is completely opposite of journalists’ duty to not spread false information. Or what about that time they published an unedited photo originally posted on Facebook of a woman who had just been murdered by her husband?

BuzzFeed’s political side relies on the same kind of virality as their original content, blatantly disregarding reporting ethics or morals--pageviews and shares obviously matter the most, instead of quality or the public good. It’s completely and utterly inappropriate for news media organizations to mask themselves as factual or objective while spewing a political narrative. It’s inappropriate when Fox News does it, and it’s inappropriate when BuzzFeed does it, too. Trust in the media is already at laughingly low levels, and the absolute last thing this country needs is another sensationalist news organization to ruin the credibility of journalists everywhere.

It would be easy to dismiss BuzzFeed as just another silly, teenage trend that will disappear in a few months. But the reality is that the company has indeed excavated a space for itself in the media world, and continues to sustain a long-lasting impression on online media consumption, through its unique synthesis of advertising and journalism. Despite their obvious capitalistic motives and sensationalist headlines, the site attracts thousands of readers daily and will continue to profit off of advertisers. Young people everywhere will continue to scroll through their timeline and laugh at what meme matches their personality.

But as faith in the media and younger generations continues to plummet, it’s imperative that we step back and consider why exactly it’s happening, and what we can do as a society to stop it. It’s completely fine to enjoy a video of women try on bras from Amazon, or take a quiz to find out what Disney Park food matches their personality. However, when this kind of content, along with politically-charged advocacy pieces, permeate through the mainstream public, it poses risks that must be addressed.

Millennials: unless we want our generation to be known for avocado toast and words like LOL, WTF or OMG--we need to do something about it. Unless we want to be known for biased and sensationalist politics, we need to do something about it. Instead of being docile and accepting this quality of content, we need to stand up for ourselves and demand more intelligence and credibility where it matters most.

I’m not advocating for everyone to delete their BuzzFeed apps and denounce the company for the rest of eternity--I’m advocating for a thorough analyzation of current media and the ways we can make it better. We’ll only see change when we stop prioritizing advertisements and money over quality, and instead prioritize originality, creativity and credibility.