BuzzFeed had silently and slyly deleted more than 4,000 posts from its website. It was a redaction of unprecedented scale, pulled off without a peep from the site’s editors. They had done it to erase some of the awkward and unseemly traces of the early days, but that was just one reason. The more damning motive behind the monumental disappearing act was that editors knew the site contained hundreds if not thousands of plagiarized posts—including, it appeared, by the Stopera brothers, Peggy Wang, and Jack Shepherd—and they were eager to sweep that under the rug. “It’s stuff made at a time when
...more
