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Snopes, which has long presented itself as the internet’s leading fact-checking source, withdrew 60 articles after a BuzzFeed News investigation found that the site’s co-founder had plagiarized news sources as part of a strategy aimed at increasing web traffic.

“As you can imagine, our staff were frightened and appalled by this situation,” Snopes chief operating officer Vinny Green said on Friday. He said the Snopes editorial team is conducting a review to understand how many articles by David Mikkelson, the site’s co-founder and managing director, contain plagiarized content from other news sites.

He said Friday afternoon the team hit 60. until Friday morning, dozens of articles removed from the site, pages that previously featured these articles now include the word “retracted” and the statement that “part or all of their content is taken from other sources without proper attribution”. According to Mr. Green, the ads in these articles have been removed.

Mikkelson, who owns 50 percent of Snopes Media Group, will continue to be Snopes’ CEO, but his authority to publish the article has been revoked, Mr Green said.

Mikkelson admitted in a statement that he was involved in “multiple serious copyright violations that Snopes has no rights to use” and praised the work of the 20 or so “dedicated, professional journalists” employed by Snopes.

“There are no excuses for my serious misjudgments,” he wrote, adding, “I want to express how sorry I am to those who have infringed copyright, to our staff, and to our readers.”

He said editor-in-chief Doreen Marchionni has been given “full authority” to address these issues.

a apology To the current staff, published Friday in Snopes, are Mr Green and Ms Marchionni, who holds a PhD. In journalism from the University of Missouri, BuzzFeed News, which accused its chief executives of deliberately crediting other people’s work to increase web traffic, called the investigation “an example of stubborn, watchdog journalism we value.”

Eight additional members of the editorial team have released their own statements. “We strongly condemn these bad journalistic practices,” they said.

BuzzFeed investigationPublished Friday, it found that from 2015 to 2019 – under Snopes’ signature, his own name and another pseudonym – Mikkelson had published dozens of articles containing language that appeared to have been copied directly from The New York Times, CNN. NBC News, BBC and other news sources. The investigation also identified cases where entire paragraphs – and in at least one case almost an entire article – appeared to have been copied.

Former Snopes editor-in-chief Brooke Binkowski said copying text from breaking news on other sites is a strategy to increase traffic. Dean Sterling Jonesis the freelance journalist who uncovered the story for BuzzFeed News.

“This was his big SEO/speed secret” Fact or Fiction, another fact-checking site, told BuzzFeed. “He used to tell us to copy text from other sites, send it verbatim so we’re fast and capture traffic, and then change the story in real time.”

In the 2016 Slack message quoted in the BuzzFeed article, Mikkelson clearly outlined this strategy. “Usually when a hot news story comes out (like the death of a celebrity), I just find a telegram service or some other piece of news about it and post it word for word on the site to quickly turn a page,” he wrote. “Once that’s done, I quickly start editing the page to rearrange it and add material from other sources to avoid plagiarism.”

Even if he had rewritten the text a few minutes after it was published, it would have been unethical by widely accepted journalistic standards. But as both the BuzzFeed investigation and Snopes’ internal investigation found, he often didn’t have the opportunity to change the phrases he had stolen.

Mr Green said that while some of the plagiarized articles are from 2019, most are from 2015 or 2016 and predate the current managing editor and editorial team.

In an interview with BuzzFeed, Mikkelson blamed his actions in part on his lack of official journalism experience. This excuse may be hard to stomach for some, given that its site calls itself “a definitive internet reference resource for investigating urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation” and has built its brand on accurate sources of information.

One of the more bizarre aspects of Mr. Mikkelson’s plagiarism tendencies is that he sometimes publishes stolen articles under the pseudonym Jeff Zarronandia. Her snopes biography He says he is an American writer and journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for numismatics – coin work – in 2006 and was one of four finalists for the award in 2008.

As for whether writing under a pseudonym and the signature of Snopes employees fueled Mr Mikkelson’s sense that he had the authority to use other people’s words, Mr Green said he was unsure.