#39 BuzzFeed faces $11m defamation lawsuit from viral news
agency
BuzzFeed is being sued for $11m
(£7.7m) by a news agency and its founder over an article titled “The King of
Bullsh*t News”.Central European News, founded and run by British journalist
Michael Leidig, has launched a US legal action claiming that BuzzFeed’s
7,000-word article deliberately set out to damage its business.The article,
published in April last year, alleged that the agency frequently runs
attention-grabbing stories that are “often inaccurate or downright false”.CEN
and Leidig allege that BuzzFeed maliciously intended to damage the news agency
in order to “obtain a greater share of the market for viral news in Great
Britain and elsewhere around the world”.They are seeking $5m each, as well as a
further $1.04m for lost business opportunities, and further punitive damages.“The
BuzzFeed story accuses Mr Leidig, an experienced and award-winning journalist,
of the worst thing you can accuse a journalist of – fraud,” said Harry Wise,
the New York-based lawyer representing CEN and Leidig. “It is unfortunate that
BuzzFeed refuses to recognise that its story is completely unfounded, and has
done terrible damage to Mr Leidig and his company. We look forward to
demonstrating those things in court.”
- BuzzFeed is being sued for $11m (£7.7m) by a news agency and its founder over an article titled “The King of Bullsh*t News”.
#40 How Facebook and Twitter changed missing child searches
Every three minutes a child is reported
missing in the UK; across the EU that number rises to one child every two minutes. In the US, the FBI
recorded almost 467,000 missing children in 2014, which is close to one
reported every minute. In the US, milk cartons, posters, flyers, meetings and
traditional news reports formed the main missing child search channels until
1996, when Dallas-Fort Worth broadcasters teamed up with local police to
develop a warning system that interrupted regular programming on television and radio
broadcasts, and highway signs. The service, Amber
Alert, is used only for the most serious of cases, sending out messages via
email, text, traffic signs and digital billboards, as well as through Twitter
and Facebook. International non-profit organisation Action Against Abduction long pressed for a similar
system in the UK, but it wasn’t until 2012, after the abduction of April Jones, that Child Rescue Alert was activated nationally.
- Newcomb says the Met operates more than 400 Twitter accounts, but also works closely with other agencies.
- In 2015 the charity created a video appeal featuring imagery of a missing girl and the person they suspected had kidnapped her. The video was shared widely and a woman spotted them.
- Extensive social media campaign in which a computer-generated composite image was estimated to have reached 47 million people on Facebook.
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