Why I Left Buzzfeed

cannot wait to see this on the richard lewis show

stupidest shit i've ever heard

cool prank, you did it. tournament organizers didn't google your team name to see if you were possibly shit disturbers entering as a joke, so they're the retards. gotcha.

um the tournament organizers didnt have to google the team name. the tournament organizers saw the team when they signed up and denied them from competing...the journalists at buzzfeed are the ones who didnt do any research before writing their article (kind of their job)

that's fair but

google the team name yourself

tell me if the results you find would indicate to a journalist "these are not trans people like they're claiming"

their website itself is.. just fucked up and devoid of content. they have a YouTube channel which doesn't really offer anything else in the way of clues. the rest of the results are recipes and restaurants. it's not like their website says "Hey! We're a bunch of non-trans dudes who are boys"

it's not blatant negligence, or some great AHA gotcha moment on journalists whatsoever. if the Google results for the team were full of like.. player profiles that mention them not being trans or articles about them pranking people in the past it'd be a little different. but a Google search reveals very little else in the way of details.

Buzzfeed don't care if it's fake news, the sole purpose of their articles is to get clicks.

Media Watch AU ran a segment last week on sites publishing fake news originating from reddit/4chan. An anonymous Daily Mail staffer told them they were encouraged to scour the sites for news and that after questioning the editor on the legitimacy of one such piece got the response, “who cares when it will get the clicks.”.

They were never not going to publish the article. Cool "trick".

To play devil's advocate here, the goal of all businesses is to provide value for shareholders. The same would therefore be true of any and all news organizations. That's reality.

Also worth noting that Buzzfeed News is operated separately from the web listicle shit. The company re-organized last August, splitting their News and Entertainment divisions. Do they need a new name to stop people from thinking they're all idiots? Absolutely. Are they totally unbiased or perfect? Not at all. Are they legitimate as a news organization? Absolutely yes.

That's interesting. I don't go anywhere near most of these "infamous" sites and have no idea about the history of Buzzfeed so cheers for the succinct summary. Just to be clear where I say sole purpose is to get clicks I wasn't implying everything they produce is BS, I just feel that in this case there was no downside to posting it because at the end of the day it's a small video game league few people follow. The article will get taken down and tomorrow no one will remember it was ever posted.

Well I'm glad he went to a respectable journalistic outfit like Infowars. Let's hope he got some radiation stickers out of it, maybe even an anti-flouride shirt.

fuck buzzfeed

e: the comments are also really funny to read https://www.buzzfeed.com/lanesainty/trans-women-barred-from-gaming-tournament?utm_term=.todyRr3DAN#.lubDpn1Kr9

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I dunno about you but to me, publishing sensational stories as fast as possible just for hits regardless of their truth absolutely rules them out as a legitimate source of news.

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You're showing me that you aren't paying any attention

Buzzfeed News does legitimate news. They have legitimate journalists with White House credentials doing real work, and publishing journalism that is not crazy or incredibly slanted. i.e. here here here and on and on

Now since I posted in this thread last night, I learned that unfortunately, it seems like they also still publish a lot of clickbaity shit under their News banner. As I posted earlier in this thread, Buzzfeed separated their News and Entertainment divisions last August. I don't really look at their news ever, but I assumed this also meant they didn't write dumb cringey shit under their News section. Unfortunately, it seems like they still do somewhat.

But they do also produce ACTUAL news - it's just that people see "Buzzfeed" and immediately say "Oh this will be shit" and don't bother to look. Again, I think a rebrand would be good but I'm not the boss.

This might make sense to you, but making a YouTube video about white power and acting like idiot 4chan kids doesn't have anything to do with whether someone is trans or not. There's no connection there. A journalist or editor wouldn't see a YouTube video of kids trolling and go "Oh okay they're not trans, they troll people. Trans people don't troll."

I don't honestly care if they divided the company into "news" and "entertainment" departments, it's still the same low-grade university graduates writing their garbage, and I'm sure I could cherry-pick three normal news stories from any old crazy place but that doesn't make them a credible or worthwhile news source, dunno why you're going to so much effort to defend a junk media outlet like buzzfeed honestly.
Also I don't think trans people (presumably quite effeminate people??) do things like call people "twinky fucking aliens" or brag about how buff and manly they are lol.

Breitbart has different divisions too, I'm sure you think they are a legit newspaper as well since they cover the White House and as they produce ACTUAL fake news.

Buzzfeed News is about as legitimate as that Nigerian Prince who needs money now

I guess my main point was to address people who call Buzzfeed bullshit without even looking, those who say to themselves "LOL WTF they don't have news, it's Buzzfeed". Regardless of the fact that they sometimes use dumb headlines and yeah, some of the shit they write about is disappointing trash, it is indeed a news organization.

But that's off-track from the main point, which is that I don't think it makes any sense to point the finger at Buzzfeed here and say they're grossly negligent or to say "they're part of the mainstream FAKE media" or whatever the line that those kids used was. They contacted the tournament people before publishing the story, and were told the reason the team was rejected. They also had documents and screenshots that showed discussions that were had, etc. To say they didn't do any research or due diligence is crazy, especially when the entire situation was cooked up as a SICK PRANK in the first place.

Team pretends to be trans because (probably) "LOL TRANS PEOPLE", is denied tournament entry because they can't produce female passports, sends these details and chat logs to Buzzfeed who publishes the story, then says BUZZFEED IS FAKE NEWS AND GROSSLY NEGLIGENT. It's the dumbest shit. YOU fucking misled them. Yeah maybe if someone Googles your team name and watches your YouTube videos, they can hear some of you talking about being manly and say "Hmm maybe they're not trans because trans people wouldn't talk about being manly" but that is so outside the purview of a journalist's job. I speak as a former journalist. I'm fact checking, I'm not going to sit down and watch a team's videos for clues when their website that I just visited blared ridiculous sounds at me and wants you to shoot a picture of a black person on their website in order to show any content at all. If a team comes to me and says they're trans, I am not going to ask myself "Are they ACTUALLY trans? I need to hunt for clues because maybe they're just guys."

If people look at this and say "Yes these nice young men are absolutely right, fake news is awful. Sad." then it just tells me a lot about their ability to think in a critical and unbiased way. Which is fine. It's a free country. These are obviously just idiot 4chan kids who like sick LULZ, not revolutionary thinkers who want to open peoples' eyes to the atrocities of media or some shit.

I mean yes alfa, Breitbart IS a legitimate news organization. Legitimate meaning they employ journalists who write real stories about world issues and current events, etc. They happen to be INCREDIBLY biased, but they're a news organization. I don't see the material they produce as worth reading, but it's because I have gone to their site, I have read their news and their articles, and I have decided that it is too slanted and biased for me to read.

With Buzzfeed, it's not that people are going and reading the stories and making a fair decision, saying "No this is not for me, it's too _____", it's normally that they see the name Buzzfeed and just go LOL NOT NEWS and liken it to a Nigerian prince email scam

buzzfeed is like the girl in highschool who everyone says has herpes, but she probably just has crabs

Other outlets with White House Press passes are Sky News, Al Jazeera, Sputnik, Breitbart, The Daily Beast, and Daily Mail.

They do 1 time out of 10

Buzzfeed has created an image of their brand as being shit and people do not need to look at what they know is bad.

Who the fuck is saying that?? Also what have you got against 4chan, honestly. You seem to bring it up constantly, like 4chan ran over your dog or something.

It being an effective moneymaking strategy doesn't impress me, and shouldn't be good enough for you, because we're not shareholders looking to make money, we're consumers who want reliable and quality news content and the fact that even some of the time they publish garbage without checking anything is enough for me to rule them out completely. If a restaurant serves you food with dogshit in it ONCE you're still never going to go back, that's buzzfeed to me.

If a news organisation loses all its credibility with posting trash/wrong stuff, I think it's very rational to assume anything they put out is bullshit without even clicking. That's how credibility works. There are plenty better news sites out there.

Also, you start off by saying "I guess my main point was to..." and then a couple sentences later you summarize what you just said with "But that's off-track from the main point". Ok.

They're in business to make money by maximising clicks while trying not to compromise their integrity as a news source, some more than others. And yeah the analogy isn't perfect I guess, bad news content doesn't have the same impact as bad food service, but over time it leaves a distinct bad taste in your mouth. In any case, I'm not trying to argue about their business strategy I'm just trying to make the point that they fuckin' suck.

because buzzfeed news puts a spin on everything in order to push their agenda. i can say the same for breitbart or infowars and it would be just as true. buzzfeed gives zero fucks about producing actual quality content. that's why they're basically a scam. they produce shit 24/7 that's designed to do nothing more but get clicks. the news thing is probably only there so they can say "no look we're a legitimate news outlet we report on things" even though its meaningless trash. /rant

I think the main issue I personally have with buzzfeed and this article is that they wrote this based on probably 10 minutes of research on what csgo esl and esports is, and one email from a source they didn't even validate, plus they made it sound like esl and the csgo community was transphobic and shit

your daily reminder that buzzfeed is a trash tier news site

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lol the people who did this are people i know from like a year ago, cant believe these retards are still doing this shit