Plagiarism
Benny Johnson was fired from BuzzFeed in July 2014 for plagiarism
BuzzFeed has been accused of plagiarizing original content from competitors throughout the online and offline press. In June 2012, Gawker's Adrian Chen observed that one of BuzzFeed's most popular writers—Matt Stopera—frequently had copied and pasted "chunks of text into lists without attribution." In March 2013, The Atlantic Wire also reported several "listicles" had apparently been copied from Reddit and other websites. In July 2014, BuzzFeed writer Benny Johnson was accused of multiple instances of plagiarism. Two anonymous Twitter users chronicled Johnson attributing work that was not his own, but "directly lift[ed] from other reporters, Wikipedia, and Yahoo! Answers", all without credit. BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith initially defended Johnson, calling him a "deeply original writer". Days later, Smith acknowledged that Johnson had plagiarized the work of others 40 times and announced that Johnson had been fired, and apologized to BuzzFeed readers. "Plagiarism, much less copying unchecked facts from Wikipedia or other sources, is an act of disrespect to the reader", Smith said. "We are deeply embarrassed and sorry to have misled you." In total, 41 instances of plagiarism were found and corrected. In 2016, claims surfaced of the YouTube channel BuzzFeedVideo stealing ideas and content from other creators. Among the accusers are YouTube users Akilah Obviously, Cr1TiKaL(penguinz0) and JaclynGlenn.
BuzzFeed has been the subject of multiple copyright infringement lawsuits, for both using content it had no rights to and encouraging its proliferation without attributing its sources: one for an individual photographer's photograph, and another for nine celebrity photographs from a single photography company.