Report: 'Snopes' Plagiarized Articles

Snopes, which has long presented itself as the internet’s premier fact-checking resource, has retracted 60 articles after a BuzzFeed News investigation found that the site’s co-founder plagiarized from news outlets as part of a strategy intended to scoop up web traffic.

“As you can imagine, our staff are gutted and appalled by this,” Vinny Green, the Snopes chief operating officer, told The NY Times on Friday. He said the Snopes editorial team was conducting a review to understand just how many articles written by David Mikkelson, the site’s co-founder and chief executive, featured content plagiarized from other news sites.

David Mikkelson

As of Friday afternoon, the team had found 60, he said. By Friday morning, dozens of articles had been removed from the site, with pages that formerly featured those articles now showing the word “retracted” and an explanation that “some or all of its content was taken from other sources without proper attribution.” Ads have been removed from these articles, according to Mr. Green.

Mikkelson, who owns 50 percent of Snopes Media Group, will continue to be Snopes’s chief executive, but his ability to publish articles has been revoked, Mr. Green said.

In a statement, Mikkelson acknowledged he had engaged in “multiple serious copyright violations of content that Snopes didn’t have rights to use” and praised the work of the 20 or so “dedicated, professional journalists” employed by Snopes.

“There is no excuse for my serious lapses in judgment,” he wrote, adding, “I want to express how sorry I am to those whose copyright I violated, to our staff, and to our readers.”

The BuzzFeed investigation, which was published Friday, found that from 2015 to 2019 — under the Snopes byline, his own name and another pseudonym — Mikkelson published dozens of articles that included language that appeared to have been copied directly from The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, the BBC and other news sources. The investigation also identified cases in which entire paragraphs — and in at least one case, nearly an entire article — appeared to have been copied.