Amid Anger Over Anti-Abortion Post, Buzzfeed Says It’s Still Figuring Out Whether to ‘Draw Lines’
These hit pieces from the anti abortion crowd are becoming more common - this one’s buzzfeed, but last weekend we also saw the Daily beast reposition an anti abortion hit piece on Wendy Davis over and over as “new” news over at least three days. I’m not sure if that one was “sponsored” or not. Whenever published there’s a guaranteed linkfest from the zealot sites, so they automatically float to the top - but it’s artificial interest, not real interest. The links come because the story touts the zealot crowd political POV. Unless the Beast and Buzzfeed want to end up becoming Salem communications II, they probably should rethink how they are doing this, because enough of these types of turds floating to the top will chase off their other readers.
BuzzFeed came under fire today after the viral site ran a post slamming Planned Parenthood.
“8 Outrageous Things Planned Parenthood Was Caught Doing,” submitted by a community contributor, the anti-abortion group PersonhoodUSA, has unsurprisingly not been a hit with BuzzFeed’s core readership.
BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith said that the site is still figuring out aspects of opening up BuzzFeed’s platform to community contributors. “We’ve been adjusting the labeling, and we’re in the process of figuring out where and whether we should draw lines about what’s appropriate on what we conceived as an open platform, like Facebook and Twitter. It’s an interesting, and complicated, question but we’re inclined to leave the platform as open as possible,” Mr. Smith told us in an email.
Although community posts are not written by BuzzFeed employees, they need to successfully ape the style so that the posts will be featured on the site. The Community page means that the BuzzFeed platform is open for contributors to make their own lists. But since the community section launched as a vertical in May, agenda-driven groups have begun to use the site as a way to gin up some publicity.
“We’ve had an explosion of interest in our community in recent weeks, and a flood of new content, a lot of it great, both from individual contributors - which had been the focus of the community — and from groups,” Mr. Smith said.
More: Amid Anger Over Anti-Abortion Post, Buzzfeed Says It’s Still Figuring Out Whether to ‘Draw Lines’