BuzzFeed Deletes Stories After Being Pressured By Advertisers


Social media giant BuzzFeed has come under fire again this week for deleting content from their site after bowing to pressure from their advertisers. Several BuzzFeed articles have been removed from the site due to varying degrees of pressure, some of which were addressed in a memo sent to BuzzFeed staff and later released to the public in its entirety by Gawker.

The first article in question comes from a piece written by Mark Duffy back in 2013. The article in question criticized Axe body spray, to the point where the advertiser asked the item to be pulled due to the author claiming they were promoting “worldwide mass rape.”

The next article in question related to Pepsi and BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief at the time, Ben Smith, explained it as such in the aforementioned memo sent to BuzzFeed staff on April 18, 2015.

“On January 27, 2014, the head of BuzzFeed’s creative division complained that Samir Mezrahi had taken a gif from a Pepsi advertisement created by BuzzFeed’s creative team and turned it into a Vine without indicating where it had come from. I asked Samir not to use advertising our business side had created in an editorial context. Four days later, he published a post titled “These Brands Are Going To Bombard Your Twitter Feed On Super Bowl Sunday,” which was a mix of criticism and praise for a long list of brands on Twitter. I again heard a complaint from our business side about Pepsi, which was the first item in the list, and whose Twitter feed they were making content for during the Super Bowl.”

A BuzzFeed article which was critical of the board game Monopoly was also pulled thanks to pressure from Hasbro. As previously reported by the Inquisitr, another article written by a staff writer criticizing a Dove ad campaign was also taken down. Also removed was an article, once again from 2013, that poked fun at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. While this was not deleted due to advertiser pressure, it was discovered that the author of that article had previously worked on Microsoft ad campaigns. While these articles were pulled, some were eventually reinstated to the BuzzFeed website.

But how many articles has BuzzFeed really pulled form their website? According to Gawker, more than 4,000 articles have been wiped from existence at BuzzFeed. Many of these fall within standard editorial rights. A recent review headed by the BuzzFeed News deputy managing editor, Annie-Rose Strasser, included such mundane issues as duplicated items, technical errors, community user deletions, and unidentified bylines. However, many of these items were deleted due to pressure in relation to editorial decisions, copyright infringements, and updated BuzzFeed writing standards.

[Image credit: Mark Davis/Getty Images Entertainment]

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