Snopes Retracts 60 Articles Plagiarized by Co-Founder: ‘Our Staff Are Gutted’

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-plagiarism-David-Mikkelson.html

by mhb • 5 years ago

50 12 5 years ago

scrash• 5 years ago

syspec• 5 years ago

In a 2016 Slack message that was quoted in the BuzzFeed article, Mr. Mikkelson explicitly outlined this strategy. “Usually when a hot real news story breaks (such as a celebrity death), I just find a wire service or other news story about it and publish it on the site verbatim to quickly get a page up,” he wrote. “Once that’s done, then I quickly start editing the page to reword it and add material from other sources to make it not plagiarized.”

Interesting article, I'm not sure I feel the above approach to be that egregious

RajBhai• 5 years ago

Ah, the Stack Overflow gambit.

inet6• 5 years ago

This is what the vast majority of news sites do.

Find a common article about a major news event, copy some of the text out and search it on Google, it'l more than likely lead you back to AP or sites that rewrite AP's content verbatim.

wodenokoto• 5 years ago

That's because they buy a subscription to AP.

AP and Reuters are news articles as a services for newspapers.

justin66• 5 years ago

This is what the vast majority of news sites do.

This is not even remotely true.

AP or sites that rewrite AP's content verbatim.

This is not what Snopes is accused of. To use all or part of an AP story's text alone or within another story is completely normal, it's what AP licensees pay for. "Rewriting" news stories entirely to avoid the need to credit the author and pay them is probably not uncommon among bloggers or something, but any news outlet will just license AP content, which is designed to be affordable. Posting unlicensed content copied verbatim in order to initially get higher SEO rankings and then changing (or failing to change) the text later on is what Snopes is accused of. It's remarkable that it took them so long to get caught, and it would be interesting to know about anyone else doing this.

xhkkffbf• 5 years ago

Egregious? It is possible to write a short summary article at the beginning and give perfectly acceptable credit to the original reporters. It's not that hard. If anything, it takes almost the same amount of work.

In one place, he's claiming that he was inexperienced and it was all a beginner's mistake. But here, he's pretty much saying "plagiarism" from the beginning. He knew what he was up to.

a3n• 5 years ago

It is possible to write a short summary article at the beginning and give perfectly acceptable credit to the original reporters.

See, for example, thehill.com. Although they do some of their own reporting, summarizing other articles and linking to them is their bread and butter.

jl2718• 5 years ago

Sounds like a takedown article. Somebody wants to control Snopes (even more than they already do).

findalex• 5 years ago

This would be the least of my issues with Snopes. Plus, haven’t you heard? This has been debunked by Snopes.

0xy• 5 years ago

This is only the tip of the iceberg of problems at Snopes. Their political content is questionable at best.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/

She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings
it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted [...] should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
Rating: Mixture

Bombing government buildings is too subjective to be labeled "terrorism".

rStar• 5 years ago

snopes has sucked for a long time. can’t get political if you’re supposed to be calling balls snd strikes. snopes definitely did to the point where it’s no longer a trusted resource.

Snopes Retracts 60 Articles Plagiarized by Co-Founder: ‘Our Staff Are Gutted’

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