BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti responded to Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren's proposition of breaking up tech companies like Google and Facebook at SXSW on Friday.
"The people at the platforms are good people. They have families. They're not anti-vaxxers themselves," Peretti said during his keynote presentation at SXSW. Peretti acknowledged that there was"a real sense of crisis in Silicon Valley" to do with the way consumers access content and maintaining integrity of that content. But he implied that the solution wasn't necessarily to break up platforms, but rather"platforms and media working together."
He made the comments while sharing a broader strategy memo that BuzzFeed released timed with SXSW on Friday, outlining BuzzFeed's path ahead in the coming year. He said his goal was fix the internet and make it less of a"dumpster fire." Other industry watchers said that breaking up the tech giants would spread digital ad dollars around more evenly.