ARENA Founder Justin Gest Pushes for a New Kind of Social Media

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Students gathered in the Miron Room at Newhouse to hear from Justin Gest, CEO and co-founder of ARENA, a new platform that reimagines social media as an open market for ideas.

ARENA founder Justin Gest speaks about reimagining social media as a marketplace for ideas at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School on October 23, 2025. Photo Credits: Matthew Davison

Gest is an award-winning scholar and professor. He has taught at George Mason University and Harvard University and written for several of the nation’s leading newspapers.

He discussed how ARENA aims to “reward being right” rather than being loud and described how the industry’s shifting incentives pushed him to think differently about how knowledge is valued.

Justin Gest, founder of the social media platform ARENA, speaks to students in the Miron Room at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School on October 23, 2025. Photo Credits: Matthew Davison

“I feel completely sidelined in today’s media environment,” Gest said. “I do not think that today’s media environment is wired in such a way that people with knowledge matter… what matters is outrage.”

He added that social media’s structure amplifies this trend.

“We are incentivized towards producing outrage,” he said. “It’s the way you get clicks; it’s the way you get eyeballs… guess what? Everyone’s going to produce outrage.”

Out of that frustration, Gest said, ARENA was born – a kind of “revenge project” meant to reward accuracy and foresight instead of virality.

ARENA founder Justin Gest demonstrates the platform to students in the Miron Room at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School on October 23, 2025. Photo Credits: Matthew Davison

“ARENA is a debate platform that reimagines social media as a stock market for ideas,” he explained. “The market is the arbiter of value… you are buying ideas that you think will gain more popularity or consensus.”

He described the platform as fostering “a race to the top, rather than today’s race to the bottom.” On ARENA, users earn credibility by getting things right, not by generating attention.

ARENA founder Justin Gest answers questions from students in the Miron Room at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School on October 23, 2025. Photo Credits: Matthew Davison

Gest spoke directly to the Newhouse students in attendance, saying Gen Z is key to building the next generation of informed, accountable commentators.

“We think we’re going to launch a new generation of pundits — not known for how they look, but because they get things correct,” he said. “I don’t want 40-year-olds editing our pages. I want 19-year-olds editing our pages.”

Gest’s talk challenged students to think critically about the future of media, and to imagine digital spaces where credibility, not controversy, drives conversation.