An analysis of Wyborcza.pl's 'More Noise, Fewer Facts' campaign as a belated fight against algorithms. I expose the hypocrisy of media outlets that have used SEO logic for years and now call for ethics as their business model collapses.
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Today, a sentimental piece on how the beneficiaries of algorithmization have suddenly discovered ethics. As long as everything went their way, the game was on. But when web traffic began to collapse and the reconstruction of the internet started devouring the ’long tail’ they had produced for years, they changed their tune.
Don Quixote in the Newsroom?
With disbelief, I read Wyborcza’s manifesto today (link in the footer) and watched its accompanying video. They are promoting “real journalism” in opposition to modern content consumption models. I like the character of Don Quixote—fighting windmills, even if doomed to fail, can be a beautiful ethical gesture. Here, however, under the guise of a fight for quality, lies a fundamental misunderstanding of what the global network has become. I have been working with the internet, algorithms, and web architecture for nearly two decades. My professional practice allows me to state bluntly: this campaign is the result of a fantasy about how the internet should look, detached from what it actually is.
It’s a generational conflict: Boomers looking back with nostalgia at the old internet and journalism—the one that supposedly ‘was to be’—versus Gen Z, for whom this internet is the only one they know. The internet is a process; get that into your heads.
Powdering the Corpse of the Good Internet
You can pump up the “dead internet” theory, you can nostalgically powder corpses from 15 years ago, but the facts are relentless. The internet has become a fluid, procedural, and multimodal environment. Telling users in 2025 to “not judge after 10 seconds” is an incantation of reality by digital boomers who long for the era of gatekeepers. Wyborcza’s campaign seems to ignore the fact that attention spans are not shrinking maliciously. It’s the result of the evolution of interfaces and our biology. The human brain online seeks dopamine hits, and platform architecture has been optimized to remove all friction. You can’t win against nature, no matter how much you want to instill rationality and “rules” into it. Emotions will always find a way out.
What’s worse, this whole narrative is based on a false dichotomy and deep hypocrisy. The campaign constructs an artificial conflict between “stupid 10-second clips” and “noble journalism,” ignoring the fact that traditional media have been operating in the same ecosystem of virality for years. Wyborcza publishes an emotion-based video to criticize emotion-based content. The very article promoting the campaign is optimized for the attention mechanics it supposedly fights—the headline and narrative (“I look like a thug…”) are classic engagement-bait tactics. It’s like McDonald’s running a campaign against fast food. The business model of a modern publisher still depends on traffic from Google, shares on social media (the same “bad” 10 seconds), and contextually adapted ads.
The Journalist’s Swan Song
If someone has played with marked SEO cards for years, mindlessly adapting to hidden indexing algorithms just to generate traffic, then today’s appeals sound grotesque. As I noted when analyzing Google’s statement on the publishers’ protest, hypocrisy is rampant in this industry. For decades, long before the era of generative AI, publishers mass-produced junk articles for the “long tail” of search. Click-through rates mattered, not quality. Now that the rules of the game are changing globally, and the phenomenon I call SEO heist and the AI takeover of attention are becoming a reality, the sudden discovery of the ethos of “real journalism” is the height of hypocrisy to me.
Traffic on sites like Wyborcza or Gazeta.pl is falling and changing not because people have become stupid, but because the way content is consumed in the multimodal internet has fundamentally changed. This is a phenomenon that the media themselves are fueling by implementing AI to redesign their services, as I wrote about in the context of changes on the Interia portal. Permanent connection to a smartphone and the speed of reaction have forced new behavioral patterns. In this whole campaign, the only thing missing is a picture of my father, spreading out a paper “Wyborcza” with his coffee at the university, reading it for an hour from cover to cover, and solving the crossword at the end. It’s a beautiful picture, but it belongs in a museum.
I am up to date with the reconstruction of the internet’s architecture, and I know one thing: the press has missed its moment. They had a chance to block the dominance of Google or Facebook a decade ago and try to change the rules of the game. Now it’s too late. Big Tech sets the rules, and the fight is cutthroat because, in the face of AI, even the big players are not sure of their survival. This campaign is not a new strategy—it’s a desperate attempt to turn back a river with a stick.
Postmortem
I must add that I am not criticizing the tools, but the hypocrisy—in case someone tries to accuse me of not understanding the deconstruction that Wyborcza is attempting. This isn’t deconstruction; it’s putting lipstick on a corpse. We lose control over distribution and suddenly cause a commotion. That’s what this text is about.
Mniej szumu, więcej faktów. W nowej kampanii Wyborcza.pl mówimy o prawdziwym dziennikarstwie
