Over the Thanksgiving holiday, someone sent a series of tweets supposedly detailing his confrontation with a woman on an airplane. Buzzfeed quickly picked up on it and presented it as an actual event. Turns out it was all fake and Buzzfeed took down their story and replaced it with “Look at this awesome hoax”. Some people have criticized Buzzfeed for this especially since the initial story showed a lack of any basic fact checking or investigation. Opinionist Andrew Sullivan wrote about it yesterday which is what spurred this thread. Buzzfeed, from what I gathered, does consider itself journalism.
That said, I’ve never thought of them as such. I wouldn’t give credibility to any story citing Buzzfeed (versus other “real” news sources) and mainly look at Buzzfeed as Cracked for people who can’t read entire paragraphs and need more photos to make up for it. I might learn some factual tidbits from Cracked but if someone cited them in a debate or serious discussion, I wouldn’t buy it. So, for purposes of this poll, I’m calling a “news source” something that you’d be inclined to accept as a credible (not infallible) source of news info.
Also, damn it, that story is fake? I suspected it was, but I decided it was true because I wanted to believe! Why did you take this from me? No, I thought it was funny, and while I usually suspect these kinds of viral tweets are staged, I suspected it was fake much more strongly when he claimed the woman slapped him (come on), but still deep in my heart I knew it was real because I wanted it, needed it, to be. Until now. You’ve ruined Christmas.
The good news is, I have three weeks to get into a passive-aggressive note passing contest turned slap fight with a crabby woman on an airplane and make it up to you.
Yes, I consider them a news source. Why the Rape Girls are Speaking Out was an excellent, well-researched, well-cited longform article, for example.
A quick glance at their site shows articles on Syria, Palestine, and South Africa. If I recall correctly, they had excellent coverage of Egypt’s protests, even if only in a promotional sense, i.e. this shit is happening, you should know what’s going down.
I am a regular reader, but I admit I go there because I am depressed and need puppy pictures.
Technically you can learn about the existence of news via Buzzfeed, but it is no “news source.”
Buzzfeed creates content strictly for virality and traffic.
In this way they are basically trolls, creating content simply to stir up the biggest response possible: They’re not honestly writing about subject x, they’re trying to leverage it to maximize shares and traffic.
So the next time you read a Buzzfeed article and you just gotta tell everyone how patently stupid and offensive it is, that might have been the whole point of the article (for your demographic).
Troll journalism sucks, monetized inflammatory pot stirring sucks and Buzzfeed sucks the hardest.
They have some more editorial-like articles but more of their articles are entertainment or “list-based.”
I would trust them as much as say “Fox News”, there is a good chance I would be getting more accurate information. That may make me “retarded”, though.
Looking at my thread title, I’ll just say now I have no idea why I capitalized the “F” in Buzzfeed in the title. It’s just “Buzzfeed” so I was correct more often than not.
But one more thing – not buying Elan’s angle of this being an example of media gone awry or Buzzfeed being the bad guy here. Well, assuming you don’t view them as a news source or are discussing the site’s many other faults. In this case, some dude tweeted a conversation he had with another person, and Buzzfeed reposted it as something funny. Okay, and? Were they supposed to send their reporters to get in touch with Diane to verify? One would do that with a news story, sure, but Buzzfeed’s material is largely much reposting things from other sites. I’ve only thought of Buzzfeed as a site for reposting material or making pointless lists captioned with 25 animated gifs.
I heard that wrote an article or two once. Edit: The dude above said what I wanted in far fewer words. (This happens a lot.)
Sure I’ll bite. And your point is kind of correct, sadly they’re all doing this to an extent, and more and more each day. But they’re not all like BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed is the exemplification of it.
But there is a difference between:
-Attempting to provide an actual take on something, but still making concessions for virality and readership
-Straight up starting each time with the question “what combination of words about which subject will stir up the most shit possible?” which is what exactly what the “viral content creator” BuzzFeed is about, by definition this is what viral content is literally about.
Their approach is all good when it comes to sharing pictures of kittens, a whole lot less so when dealing with anything controversial. Because when you’re dealing with anything controversial, the (one true) way to maximize virality is “generate as much controversy as possible.”
The bigger the shitstorm you instigate, the more successful your viral content is by definition. The content that sparks wars sure looks great in the metrics that you look at to measure whether it was successful: pageviews, shares, engagement, time on page. When a war breaks out people come back multiple times (pageviews), read through the comments (time on site), weigh in (engagement), tell their friends (shares), etc… So if you’re a “viral” content generator, when it comes to controversy you’re pretty well racing to the bottom.
I understand your point completely, all timestamps displayed. I guess I’m just more immune to that stuff because I read Fark every day, which is the trolliest of trolls. I feel like Buzzfeed is more good-natured compared to Fark or, say, Gawker.
But it’s definitely just another picture-stealing aggregator site trying to get hits and sell ads.
Not really, to me they’re mostly a news aggregator and cute GIF source.
So it always surprises the fuck out of me when they post a good, original article like the one on Glenn Greenwald’s partner, titled David Miranda Is Nobody’s Errand Boy.
I will use Buzzfeed as a source for happening upon news stories…like if I am clicking through there and news happens and I read about it from there. Much like I consider the SDMB a source for happening upon news stories.
But I don’t think of them as going out and getting feet-on-the-ground news content any more than I think of you guys doing it.
Yes they do occasionally have “long form” pieces. But it’s not usually where I go to read long-form pieces either.
I only read it when I get sent links. It’s usually like Cracked except without the writing, editing, or humor. Just a list of still images or GIFs with titles. I am sure that they do some more sophisticated stuff otherwise I just haven’t seen it. Then again, the internet is full of shallow “news” sites. News aggregators and the like.
