Buzzfeed Has Deleted Close to 5,000 Plagiarized Articles Without Telling Anybody

Slate – Thirty-Nine Listicles Whose Sourcing Is Shaky at Best. One Writer Fired for Plagiarism.Four Thousand Old Posts That Mysteriously Disappeared.Fourteen Media Critics Who Are Very Disappointed in BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed’s mastery of the dark arts of making things go viral on Facebook has endeared it to tech investors, including Silicon Valley power players Andreessen Horowitz, who recently led a $50 million venture capital round. But it has also invited envy and scorn from rivals. And it has opened the site’s practices to a level of journalistic scrutiny that its creators never anticipated. Last month the site fired staff writer Benny Johnson after a pair of sharp-eyed bloggers documented several instances of evident plagiarism; for example, a U.S. politics quiz whose answers appeared to be partly copied and pasted from Wikipedia. The latest backlash came this week when Gawker’s J.K. Trotter reported that more than 4,000 old BuzzFeed posts seem to have simply disappeared from the site. The discovery came as Trotter was following up on a July post in which he revealed that at least four posts, including three by senior editor Matt Stopera, had mysteriously vanished. Peretti says to keep in mind that BuzzFeed began as a tech company, not a media company. Retracting four thousand posts without telling anyone is simply unheard of. In a phone interview on Tuesday, Peretti confirmed that BuzzFeed embarked on a project earlier this year to take down old posts that didn’t meet its editorial standards.

I’m not sure how I missed this article last week? This is perfect and pretty much confirms everything I said about Buzzfeed and why they are the worst. But what is especially infuriating about this article is they basically admit that they are crooks. That they built their empire by stealing shit from every single website in the world. That they figured out a way to find out what was trending on every site from Reddit to Barstool, organized it and gave no credit to anybody. Then once they got enough traffic and revenue from using stolen, unsourced material they stopped doing it, deleted it all and act like it never happened or it wasn’t wrong. That it somehow didn’t count because they were just a technology company at the time. It’s disgusting. That’s why they are deleting shit. It has nothing to do with not being proud of those articles. They don’t want to get sued for building their empire on the sweat equity and brains of other people which is pretty much exactly what they did.

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PS – That dude Matt Stopera who is a senior editor/plagerizer was the guy I actually emailed with years ago about stealing our shit. He basically just told me to grow up and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I guess he was right. And now he’s probably rich while I’m slinging socks.