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Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

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Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#191

Post by farp »

busymom0 wrote: post #105
qkqk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remind me of their narrative again? They say that > "Trump did not explicitly tell people to 'storm' or 'breach' or 'break into' the [US] Capitol." and included the reasoning that > the president called on supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” march or walk to the Capitol ...but wait, their far-left narrative! Why didn't they omit those references and reasoning?! https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-tell-su…

Almost all these “fact checkers” exposed themselves on the lab leak theory which they had to redact after 1.5 years. Relying on any of them as a source of “truth” is asking for trouble. They are more of a narrative check.

Parent comment is just a rehashing of a Fox News article. Seeing this more often on HN.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/realclearpolitics-fact-checker...

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#192

Post by staticassertion »

pembrook wrote: post #188
danso wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example of what you're talking about: The original r/AskReddit thread ("What feels illegal, but isn't?"): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/aszfh3/what_feel... The Buzzfeed repurposing of that thread ("19 Things That FEEL Illegal Even Though They Definitely Aren't"): https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/if-you-have-a-guilty... And a r/mildlyinfuriating thread about Buzzfeed's repurposing ("Buzz…

So using your logic, I'm totally free to copy-paste the entirety of a New York Times article onto my website and sell ads on that content...as long as I credit the author? I think the lawyers of the NYT may have a different opinion about that. The fact is, Buzzfeed was able to get away with stealing content from reddit and selling ads on it because no reddit user was ever going to hire a lawyer to sue them over it. A…

Presumably NYT has a different EULA/TOS/Copyright restrictions.

It's explicitly not stealing content.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#193

Post by rhino369 »

pembrook wrote: post #188
danso wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example of what you're talking about: The original r/AskReddit thread ("What feels illegal, but isn't?"): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/aszfh3/what_feel... The Buzzfeed repurposing of that thread ("19 Things That FEEL Illegal Even Though They Definitely Aren't"): https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/if-you-have-a-guilty... And a r/mildlyinfuriating thread about Buzzfeed's repurposing ("Buzz…

So using your logic, I'm totally free to copy-paste the entirety of a New York Times article onto my website and sell ads on that content...as long as I credit the author? I think the lawyers of the NYT may have a different opinion about that. The fact is, Buzzfeed was able to get away with stealing content from reddit and selling ads on it because no reddit user was ever going to hire a lawyer to sue them over it. A…

That would be copyright infringement, but as long as its 100% clear that you are quoting or paraphrasing the NYTimes its not plagiarism. It's also not journalism or really even writing.

I would even call it stealing content. But plagiarism is about passing someone else's work off as yours.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#194

Post by aalam »

dheera wrote: post #162
pembrook wrote: post #144

All modern media companies today have been built by using these kinds of shady "growth hacks." Doesn't anybody see the irony of Buzzfeed calling out a fellow media company for using such tactics? Buzzfeed's entire growth strategy for years was copy-pasting content from trending reddit threads and turning them into "listicles" with clickbait headlines, then feeding them into Facebook. Was that not also plagiarism?

Exactly, I'm not actually surprised, don't most news media just copy articles from each other? Every time I post a guest blog to a news site it appears on 10 other news sites within a day.

There's a term for that in journalism: "matching" a story. This traditionally involves legwork, such as contacting the same sources quoted in the first article to verify that facts are true.

This legwork is usually done by traditionally respected publications (i.e. not just copying and pasting). Other outlets and blogs with different goals do blatantly copy and paste, which produces articles less valuable than those traditionally matched.

Matching—versus copying and pasting—is important because it avoids the spread of false reports. From "The Elements of Journalism" by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel: "Originality is a bulwark of better journalism, deeper understanding, and more accurate reporting. […] In the era before curation and aggregation, the tradition of “matching” stories was rooted in the same idea. Rather than publishing another news outlet’s scoop, journalists tended to require one of their reporters to call a source to confirm it first. This tradition of matching was a way for news organizations to avoid having to credit their rivals, which in this earlier era was considered an embarrassing admission of being scooped. Yet the tradition of matching had another more important and salutary effect. Stories that couldn’t be independently confirmed would not be repeated."

A norm in the journalism industry is to credit the first publication who reported an investigative scoop, naming the outlet (e.g. this New York Times article [0] cites information reported by less-read Punchbowl News).

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/21/us/joe-biden

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#195

Post by hannasanarion »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #101
corndoge wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good thing. I want to see those changes. Preventing people from seeing the change log of a page because "conspiracy theorists might use it" is dangerous thinking. Saying that it's okay to forego transparency because it could be used to bolster people who disagree with you is backwards. That's precisely why transparency should be retained - when you're the person disagreeing, it benefits you.

Case in point: On Jan 6, NPR published an article with a 10AM headline and timestamp about the upcoming Trump rally. Later in the day, they changed the headline to be something like "Insurgents invade Capital building", but did not change the 10AM timestamp up top. One had to read the article to find the update timestamp. Newsmaxx, and thus many if its viewers looked at the headline and headline timestamp and trumpet…

This kind of thing also makes the internet less searchable.

I was trying to find some information on the previous activity of a cop who recently became infamous in my area for beating and choking a man who was pleading for his life, to see if he had ever been in the news before. So I used the time window feature on Google, only to get tons and tons of articles published that same day that were backdated years because of bad change management.

See for yourself on the link to a google search below, results are filtered between 2018 and January 2021, but every single article for the first five pages is about the incident that occurred two weeks ago, mistakenly backdated years.

https://bit.ly/3xEpCGA

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#196

Post by kalium-xyz »

dheera wrote: post #162
pembrook wrote: post #144

All modern media companies today have been built by using these kinds of shady "growth hacks." Doesn't anybody see the irony of Buzzfeed calling out a fellow media company for using such tactics? Buzzfeed's entire growth strategy for years was copy-pasting content from trending reddit threads and turning them into "listicles" with clickbait headlines, then feeding them into Facebook. Was that not also plagiarism?

Exactly, I'm not actually surprised, don't most news media just copy articles from each other? Every time I post a guest blog to a news site it appears on 10 other news sites within a day.

Sure seems so. When I followed the entire stallman controversy everyone just copied the first article sometimes citing it as a source of the controversial information to deter potential liability's but never to the credit Ir good of said source. Similarly on any other niche enough or single sourced event you see this behavior as if repeating some joke said by another person.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#197

Post by chipotle_coyote »

pessimizer wrote: post #155
argomo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fact checkers reconcile memes/news media against primary sources/other news media while adding context, references, and journalistic integrity. Yes, they're human and inevitably bring their own biases, but do you really think we shouldn't have some folks doing that job?

> Fact checkers reconcile memes/news media against primary sources/other news media Yes, that's what they do. They should do this for every article in your publication. > while adding context, references, and journalistic integrity. No, this is editorial.

I think you're trying to draw too fine a line. Fact-checking is definitionally part of the editorial process. In publications that don't have separate fact-checking departments, it would literally be part of the editor's job description.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#198

Post by betwixthewires »

ezekiel68 wrote: post #152

A lot of the responses here seem to be attempting to sow Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) on the fact-checking articles themselves (which were not in any way implicated by the revelations of this article). As if there is some kind of "essence" that permeates an orgainization which either wholly condemns it or wholly justifies it. I reject this assessment. Every article stands or falls on its own.

When we call some information source "reputable" we are saying that we are relying on their reputation of having integrity so as to not have to dig into every detail of everything ourselves. Every article linked on godlike productions stands on it's own as well by this logic. If we go by this logic there is no reputable or disreputable organization, there are only articles. Of course that defeats the whole purpose of branding your organization, so even in this case there is no reason to trust Snopes or any other fact checker, there's no reason for fact checking because you have to fact check the fact checks yourself as every article stands on it's own.

But of course that's not how it works. We rely on brands like Snopes because we trust them, because we view them as having a reputation of integrity. So it isn't fud to point out that there are shameless bald faced liars without an ounce of integrity at all running the organization.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#199

Post by kalium-xyz »

aalam wrote: post #194
dheera wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, I'm not actually surprised, don't most news media just copy articles from each other? Every time I post a guest blog to a news site it appears on 10 other news sites within a day.

There's a term for that in journalism: "matching" a story. This traditionally involves legwork, such as contacting the same sources quoted in the first article to verify that facts are true. This legwork is usually done by traditionally respected publications (i.e. not just copying and pasting). Other outlets and blogs with different goals do blatantly copy and paste, which produces articles less valuable than those…

Ive not ever seen the positive effects of this on internet journalism rather than echoing with less details and obfuscating actual information.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#200

Post by AceJohnny2 »

pembrook wrote: post #144

All modern media companies today have been built by using these kinds of shady "growth hacks." Doesn't anybody see the irony of Buzzfeed calling out a fellow media company for using such tactics? Buzzfeed's entire growth strategy for years was copy-pasting content from trending reddit threads and turning them into "listicles" with clickbait headlines, then feeding them into Facebook. Was that not also plagiarism?

BuzzfeedNews != Buzzfeed.

BuzzfeedNews is legitimate journalism, financed with the money from the clickbaity Buzzfeed.

But I agree the co-branding has its downsides.

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