Adnan Abidi / Reuters
Uber Technologies cofounder and former CEO Travis Kalanick announced that he had appointed two new board members on Friday night in an unexpected move that may increase his power and sow more discord at the San Francisco-based ride-hailing company.
In a statement, Kalanick named former Xerox chairwoman and CEO Ursula Burns and former Merrill Lynch chairman and CEO John Thain to the board, which previously had nine members. Burns will be the third woman on the board, in addition to Nestlé executive vice president Wan Martello and former media executive Arianna Huffington.
Kalanick's power to unilaterally name these two board members comes from a now-disputed decision from last year, in which the board granted him the power to make three appointments as part of a $3.5 billion investment from a Saudi Arabia wealth fund. After he was removed as CEO in June, Kalanick named himself to one of the three seats and reserved the right to appoint the two other positions.
This decision comes as Uber and its investors are negotiating a multi-billion dollar deal with Japanese investment firm SoftBank and follows the company's appointment of Dara Khosrowshahi as its new CEO last month.
"I am appointing these seats now in light of a recent Board proposal to dramatically restructure the Board and significantly alter the company's voting rights," Kalanick said in a statement. "It is therefore essential that the full Board be in place for proper deliberation to occur, especially with such experienced board members as Ursula and John."
According to a source familiar with the situation, Benchmark Capital, a large shareholder and board seat holder, proposed a change in the company's voting structure earlier this week that would eliminate the super-voting power of shares held by early investors and executives like Kalanick. All shares, in the proposal, would carry equal weight in voting matters. The board discussed the matter on Thursday and is expected to vote on the proposal next week.
“The appointments of Ms. Burns and Mr. Thain to Uber’s Board of Directors came as a complete surprise to Uber and its Board," said an Uber spokesperson in a statement. "That is precisely why we are working to put in place world-class governance to ensure that we are building a company every employee and shareholder can be proud of.”
Kalanick's move could be seen as a means of strengthening his position against Benchmark, which led the effort to oust him in June after employee complaints, press reports, and two internal investigations revealed sexual harassment, discrimination, and executive misbehavior at the company. Benchmark also sued Kalanick earlier this year for fraud and argued that his right to appoint new board members should be removed because he allegedly did not inform the board at the time of the issues at the company. Last month, a Delaware judge sent that lawsuit to arbitration.
A spokesperson for Benchmark did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kalanick had wanted to wait after the court case and arbitration to fill the two board seats, according to a person familiar with his thinking, but accelerated the process once Benchmark introduced its new voting proposal earlier this week and moved to vote on it next week. He had met with a handful of business executives over the last three months since Benchmark initiated its lawsuit just to be prepared to fill the seats if needed.
Though Kalanick had control over delegating the two seats, he was not allowed to use empty seats to cast board votes. That motivated him to go forward with appointing Burns and Thain, a move that that he discussed with some Uber board members in advance, according to the source.
Stephen Lam / Reuters
Two days after the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a mistake that now consumes his company: He dismissed the idea that misinformation on the social network could have influenced election results as "pretty crazy idea." After months of escalating crisis, he finally walked it back Wednesday, describing his words as wrongly "dismissive."
But BuzzFeed News has learned that while Zuckerberg's comment may have been a blunder, it wasn't an accident. The comment was, instead, a scripted talking point, aimed at undercutting further criticism.
Just a day after the election, Elliot Schrage, Facebook's high powered vice president of communications and public policy, used the phrase at a gathering of communications pros, hosted by a prominent venture capital firm and a well known Silicon Valley communications shop.
“It was not coincidental that there was such similarity in the response.”
“Elliot essentially foreshadowed Mark’s comments” a person who attended the event told BuzzFeed News. “It was not coincidental that there was such similarity in the response.”
The event, hosted by Accel Ventures and the Pramana Collective at Bluxome Street Winery in San Francisco’s SoMA district, featured a Q&A with Schrage and former Obama White House sr. advisor Dan Pfeiffer. Responding to a question about fake news, Schrage answered with a beta version of the "pretty crazy idea" remark that Zuckerberg would later make. “It was a tonality of, does anyone here think that we have the responsibility to police this?” the attendee said. “They were probably in the process of coming up with messaging around it.”
Sources say the remark received some polite pushback from the mostly friendly crowd. “It wasn’t people standing up and shouting at him. It was more, like, ‘Really?,’” another attendee said. “That reaction was characteristic of the point of view of the company,” the attendee added.
Reached for comment, Schrage declined to speak with BuzzFeed News. He referred BuzzFeed News to a Facebook spokesperson who provided the following statement. "Elliot's point was that it was impossible to draw conclusions so quickly after the election given there were so many possible causes for the outcome."
The fact that the "dismissive" line was seemingly tested by a senior Facebook communications official before Zuckerberg uttered it spotlights the breadth of Facebook's early failure to comprehend the severity of 2016 election meddling that occurred on its platform. Only now is the social giant coming to terms with its role in Russia’s interference of last year’s presidential election. Earlier this month, Facebook said a Russian government-linked entity spent $100,000 on ads meant to influence the election.
Revisiting the comment on Wednesday, Zuckerberg was uncharacteristically apologetic. “After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea,” he said. “Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it.”
Zuckerberg’s comment has been held up as a symbol of the disconnect between Facebook's own perception of its platform and its real-world consequences, which now include the proliferation of fake election news, Russian meddling in the last US presidential election, the deletion of tens of thousands of fake accounts ahead of Germany’s Federal election and a contested French presidential election, Twitter attacks from President Donald Trump, and growing scrutiny from US lawmakers.
On Wednesday, the Senate intelligence committee asked Facebook, along with Google and Twitter, to testify publicly about Kremlin attempts to use social media to sway last year’s presidential election. Facebook has not yet said whether it will attend.
Debbie Focht relies on Square, a payment processor, to sell her honey and maple syrup products at the weekly farmers' market at Muscoot Farm in Katonah, N.Y. She and her husband, Rich, own Hummingbird Ranch in Salt Point, N.Y., and say that Square has helped boost profits at their small business.
Jennifer A. Kingson / Via Jennifer A. Kingson
If you've shopped at a farmer's market, gotten your hair cut at a small salon, or taken a golf lesson with an independent pro, chances are you've made a payment through Square, the credit card processing company founded by Jack Dorsey, who also helped start Twitter.
Small businesses love Square because it charges them less than the bigger, bank-owned payment processors, and the little white card-swipes that plug into a smartphone are easier and more convenient than handheld credit card terminals. Square also — through a partnership with a tiny bank in Utah — makes loans to small companies and entrepreneurs whom banks would turn away.
And this is where things get dicey: As much as small merchants love Square, banks distrust it, particularly now that the company, which is based in San Francisco, has applied to become an Industrial Loan Company, a controversial type of banking license offered in Utah and a few other states.
Square clearly has big ambitions: Jacqueline D. Reses, the head of Square Capital — its nascent business financing arm — told BuzzFeed News that the company "is uniquely positioned to build a bridge between the financial system and the underserved," specifically in lending and providing software to small businesses.
"We would pursue business lending, and then we would look at deposits and what other banking services we could provide to our sellers," said Reses, who was previously Yahoo's chief development officer and a director at Alibaba Group.
A Square Inc payment processor is shown plugged into an iPad at a vendors site along the High Line in New York March 9, 2016. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
Shannon Stapleton / Reuters
For now, since Square doesn't have the license it needs to take deposits or make loans, it is only offering loans to its merchants through Celtic Bank, a small business bank in Utah that is regulated by the FDIC.
Square is one of three fintech companies that have recently applied for bank charters, and one of two to apply for an ILC. Varo Money, a one-year-old startup that offers mobile-only banking through an iPhone app, applied for a national bank charter, while Social Finance Inc. — better known as SoFi — which offers student loan refinancing as well as mortgages and personal loans, applied to become an ILC.
Jacqueline Reses, the head of Square Capital, is shown in San Francisco on October 19, 2015, the day she left Yahoo to join Jack Dorsey at Square.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
And while Square insists it only wants to make small loans to the merchants it serves, banks see this as a backdoor way into their bread-and-butter business of taking deposits and making loans, both to businesses and consumers.
Opposition to ILC applications is one issue that unites bankers with consumer advocacy and reinvestment groups, which tend to be on opposite sides of financial regulatory issues. The ILC charter gives companies most of the privileges of being a bank — the ability to take deposits and make loans — but with much less regulation and with the ability to run commercial businesses on the side, which mainstream banks can't do. (Square, for instance, sells its payment processing system and business software, and even operates a food delivery service.)
Becoming an industrial loan company is "a loophole that is now being exploited," Chris Cole, the executive vice president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a bank trade group, told BuzzFeed News.
"The owners of these banks can engage in commercial activity if they want, whereas a traditional bank owner, subject to the Bank Holding Act, can only engage in activities that are closely related to banking," he added.
Indeed, days after Square submitted its ILC application this month, the Independent Community Bankers of America called on the FDIC to put in place a two-year moratorium on ILCs getting deposit insurance.
The ICBA worries that allowing technology companies like SoFi (which recently lost its CEO to a sexual harassment scandal) into the banking system through an ILC would encourage massive companies with a more tenuous relationship with banking to own banks — like Amazon, Alphabet, or Walmart.
The group opposes both Square and SoFi's applications, and its head, Camden Fine, made the conflict with SoFi more personal, tweeting: "SoFi turmoil another reason FDIC shld deny app! Extending deposit safety net to non-bk activities dangerous & not what congress intended!"
Banks have been here before: In 2006, efforts by Walmart and Home Depot to get deposit insurance — and potentially turn all their shoppers into their banking customers — prompted bankers to lobby successfully for a moratorium on the issuance of ILCs by the FDIC. Walmart thought a bank would let it more more effectively process payments, while Home Depot wanted to make loans to finance home improvements.
Then, in 2010, the Dodd-Frank Act put in place another three-year pause for ILCs getting deposit insurance that ran out in 2013.
And Square, with its at least 2 million merchant customers, may look to today's bankers a lot like Walmart did a decade ago. The company has been aggressively soliciting the merchants who use it as a payment processor, offering them small-dollar loans by email.
Take Courtney Foster, who runs a one-chair salon in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan and has used Square to accept payments for years. One day she got an email from Square Capital with an offer of a loan of $1,000 to $1,500, which would be paid back directly out of her payments processed through Square.
She has since borrowed about $3,000 in total from Square using the money (supplied by Celtic Bank) to start her own line of hair products.
Foster had been a Square customer for years before opening her own salon, using its phone dongle to accept payments from private clients. So getting a loan from the company seemed like a logical next step, particularly after her experience with a loan officer at a large bank, who "just laughed me out," she told BuzzFeed News.
But Square approved her loan in a few hours — and all online. "I sat on the bed and tears came out of my eyes," Foster told BuzzFeed News.
Because of its deep financial relationships with its merchants, Square is already under heavy regulatory scrutiny in the states in which it operates, Reses said. Square "has gone through the process on behalf to be almost fully compliant with FDIC guidelines," she added. "At the point where you’re at our scale, we’d rather be directly regulated by the FDIC."
Reses would be the chair of the new bank, which would be run by Lewis Goodwin, a former executive at Green Dot, the giant seller of prepaid debit cards.
The average loan approved by Square is about $6,000, and the company has either advanced or loaned almost $2 billion since 2014. The amount due back is typically 10% to 16% more than the amount loaned out — which is on the low end for similar types of small business finance — with payments coming out of a fixed percentage of the merchant's receipts received through Square. The whole balance is due after 18 months, though Square customers can repay early.
Square sees itself as stepping in to provide loans to small but growing businesses that typically don't have the earnings track record to hear from a bank. "We serve businesses that are otherwise underserved," Reses said. More than half the loans go to women, while about a third go to minority borrowers, she added.
If Square — or SoFi — is approved for an ILC, it will be able to operate nationally as a bank, overseen by federal regulators with the ability to apply for deposit insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
SoFi, which primarily offers loans, wants the Utah banking license because it "would allow us as a non-bank parent to have a captive bank subsidiary, though which we can offer our members deposit accounts," Jim Prosser, a SoFi spokesman, told BuzzFeed News.
While technology companies offering financial services is nothing new — PayPal is a $71 billion public company — they have shied away from becoming full-fledged banks.
While many of the largest tech companies, like Facebook, Alphabet, and Apple — have dipped their toes into providing financial services like payments, it's only been more finance-focused upstarts that have pushed to become banks.
Typically, the well-known companies that try to become ILCs are either non-financial companies that want to offer financial services to their customers — Walmart, Ford, Chrysler, and Home Depot have all applied for ILC status — or financial companies that want to have some traditional banking operations, like Goldman Sachs, which had a Utah ILC banking operation until it was converted into a bank holding company during the financial crisis.
Utah has 16 industrial banks, and most fall into the latter category, while some are retailers that issue their own loans, like BMW. Other companies that operate Utah industrial banks include American Express, USAA, UBS, and Sallie Mae.
But lately there's been an explosion in new, non-bank companies, many funded by technology investors that mostly operate online. OnDeck and Square Capital, which both lend to businesses, use Celtic Bank, while Lending Club, which mostly originates personal loans, works with the Utah-chartered Web Bank.
Most customers do not notice. The technology companies handle the underwriting and customer relationship.
"What many people don’t realize is that some of the most innovative products they work with every day on their smartphones or computers all involve banks in the background," said Stephen A. Aschettino, a lawyer and parter at Loeb and Loeb. "That brings complexity and slows down transactions, if those providers can provide them directly and not utilize banks, it opens up innovations and arguably saves transaction costs."
For a company like Square that provides lots of services that are financial, but not strictly related to banking, becoming a national bank would require a wholesale reorientation and reorganization of its business, including having the entire parent company overseen by the Federal Reserve, as opposed to the bank itself being overseen by the FDIC.
"A lot of parent companies do not want to regulated or supervised by the federal reserve," Jim Barth, an Auburn University professor and fellow at the Milken Institute, told BuzzFeed News.
For Square, the variety of other businesses it operates makes getting a national bank charter almost impossible. "All of those businesses would not be relevant and fit within a regime of a bank holding company," Reses said.
There is also the issue of the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to meet the credit needs of all the consumers in the places where it does business —particularly low- and moderate-income consumers. John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition worries that ILCs can get banking charters without the same obligations to make credit widely available -- and this position has made him a strange bedfellow of banking lobbies.
The ILC applicants "want to have access to the resources banks have," said Taylor. And to him -- and some banks -- this raises concerns "about safety and soundness and lack of regulatory oversight that could create malfeasance."
Another fintech company, Varo, is taking a different approach: to meet its goal of becoming a mainstream mobile-only deposit-taking bank, it wants to become a full-on national bank overseen by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve. Varo applied in July for both its charter from the OCC and deposit insurance from the FDIC.
"We founded the company with the ideal that we would become a national bank today," Colin Walsh, Varo's CEO, told BuzzFeed News.
Twelve school kids win a trip to Antarctica for naming Australia's new icebreaker nuyina, the Indigenous word for southern lights, becoming the first ever children to fly to the continent under the Australian Antarctic Program.
Earlier today, some YouTube content creators got pissed. Really pissed.
They were (wrongly, it turns out) under the impression that in order to link to Patreon crowdfunding accounts or other personal websites from inside their videos, YouTube was going to require them to run ads.
But YouTube says it’s not requiring content creators to run ads, it’s only requiring them to join the YouTube Partner Program, which enables the possibility of running ads, but doesn’t require it.
Google says the new rules only apply to future content, not content that’s already been posted to YouTube. The purpose of the change, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News via email, is to “curb abuse.” Asked what kind of end-link abuse Google is trying to curb, Google pointed to its community guidelines, which encourages users to follow “common-sense rules” and not post pornography, graphic violent content, hate speech, threats, copyright infringement, or content that encourage dangerous behavior. The idea is that, by requiring content creators to join the YouTube Partner Program, YouTube will have greater insight into what outside sites creators are linking to.
But some content creators are skeptical that curbing abuse is Google’s real reason for introducing the new requirement. In the past year, YouTube has taken steps to limit the kinds of content creators can monetize, a move which upset a number of users. That Google is now seizing more control over creators rubs some of them the wrong way.
“People hate YouTube,” said Victoria Rose, who runs gaming website Flying Courier, via DM. “YouTube’s been cutting off/restricting monetization, so people like something new to be mad at.”
As an alternative, content creators can still link to their Patreons (or their Etsy pages or Twitch sites or MySpace profiles) in their videos’ description boxes without becoming partners. They only have to join the program if they want to use the popular “end links” that pop up at the end of videos, and which content creators say are more effective. (Asked why end links are preferred to links in the description box, YouTuber Ian Danskin told BuzzFeed News via DM “Heh, because people actually click them.”)
YouTubers were so worked up about this change because end links help some YouTube content creators grow their fan bases and make a significant amount of money on crowdfunding sites like Patreon.
If content creators want to use these end links, however, they are now required to join the YouTube Partner Program and turn on monetization. Google says that creators can choose which ads to monetize and have the option of not running ads on any videos.
The new rules also have a small catch: YouTube content creators with fewer than 10,000 total views across their channels were banned from joining the partner program back in April. At the time, Google said it was restricting access to the program in order to prevent copycat channels from making money off of stolen content. But the new rule requiring creators to join the partner program if they want to use end links effectively means that creators with smaller viewerships can’t use the end links at all, because their channels are too small to be allowed in the partner program. It’s a catch-22 that could make it harder for small-timers to grow their audiences anywhere other than YouTube, which could benefit YouTube in the long run.
iPhone 8 Plus
Mark Lennihan / AP
Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai urged Apple on Thursday to activate the hidden FM radio inside many of its iPhone models, framing the radio functionality as a matter of public safety in the wake of recent disasters that have plagued the US and Puerto Rico.
"It is time for Apple to step up to the plate and put the safety of the American people first," Pai said in a statement. "Apple is the one major phone manufacturer that has resisted doing so. But I hope the company will reconsider its position, given the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria."
Samsung, LG, Motorola, and HTC all sell devices with functional FM radios, according to the radio streaming app Nextradio. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also argued for enabling the FM radio chips present in many smartphones.
In his statement, Pai pointed to a Sept. 14 editorial in the Florida newspaper Sun Sentinel that argued for the same point: "Given our nation’s dependence on cell phones, the smartphone’s FM switch is a public safety issue."
iPhone X
Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP
In response Thursday, Apple said in a statement that its newer models do not support the radio functionality.
"iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models do not have FM radio chips in them nor do they have antennas designed to support FM signals, so it is not possible to enable FM reception in these products," an Apple spokesperson said.
Apple did not comment on devices that preceded the iPhone 7 and 8 or other models it continues to sell, including the iPhone SE. It's also unclear how easy such an undertaking would be for Apple, and neither side went into specifics about how the company would activate the FM chips.
"Apple cares deeply about the safety of our users, especially during times of crisis and that’s why we have engineered modern safety solutions into our products," it continued. "Users can dial emergency services and access Medical ID card information directly from the Lock Screen, and we enable government emergency notifications, ranging from Weather Advisories to AMBER alerts."
Apple may have kept the FM chip inside its iPhone models deactivated to aid its own music store and streaming service, but as the Sun Sentinel pointed out: "Our app and streaming addictions won’t disappear if we have the option of listening to FM radio. That’s why our earbuds are plugged into an iPhone, not a Walkman."
The FCC chairman has advocated for the activation of the FM chip before. In his statement, he noted that his first public speech as chairman urged cell phone companies to enable the functionality.
John Paczkowski contributed to this report.
BuzzFeed News / Getty Images
On Thursday morning, Twitter Vice President for Public Policy Colin Crowell met with the House and Senate Intelligence communities about the company's potential involvement with Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Among the information Crowell shared was that the company found around 200 accounts that seem to be linked to the same Russian groups that purchased roughly $100,000 of ads on Facebook to sway Americans and create divisions during the 2016 election. Twitter also revealed that of the 450 malicious accounts shared by Facebook, 22 had corresponding Twitter accounts. Many, Twitter, said, had already been shuttered by the network.
The company also shared information on the Russian television and media organization RT after the company was singled out by intelligence agencies for its ties to the Russian government. Twitter told the committees that three RT accounts spent $274,100 in US ads in targeted US markets in 2016. Twitter said that most of these accounts were "directed at followers of mainstream media and primarily promoted RT Tweets regarding news stories."
While Twitter itself notes that there's plenty the company cannot share (due to security and potential exploits by bad actors), a few of the numbers released by the company detail the scale of the problem on Twitter (of which foreign bots are part of). Including:
- "On average, our automated systems catch more than 3.2 million suspicious accounts globally per week — more than double the amount we detected this time last year. "
- Twitter's automated tools "catch about 450,000 suspicious logins per day."
- Twitter notes the prevalence of spam from single suspicious entities, noting that it stopped "more than 5.7 million spammy follows from a single source just last week (9/21/2017)."
- According to Twitter, since "June 2017, we’ve suspended more than 117,000 malicious applications for abusing our API, collectively responsible for more than 1.5 billion low-quality Tweets this year."
The findings are just the first, small look at the platform's role in the 2016 campaign with regard to the potential spreading of propaganda and misinformation. And Twitter will likely be back in front of Congress soon. This week Recode reported that congress is expected to invite Google, Facebook, and Twitter to testify in an open session in October. Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee has extended an invitation to Facebook, Twitter, and Google to appear on November 1st.
BuzzFeed News; Alamy
As ad dollars that used to fund journalism pour into the coffers of Facebook and Google, the information business is experiencing a trend familiar to other American industries: The product they produce is now competing with cheaper versions coming from overseas.
Content farmers in the Philippines, Pakistan, Macedonia (of course), and beyond are launching websites and Facebook pages aimed at Americans in niches such as politics, mental health, marijuana, American muscle cars, and more.
Based on Facebook engagement and other metrics, some of these overseas publishers are now beating their American counterparts. In the process they’re building an industry centered on producing and exporting cheap (and sometimes false) information targeted at the US.
“This is like all of the basic stuff happening in economics and politics today,” said Tyson Barker, a political economist with the Aspen Institute Germany who specializes in international economic policy. “It's a globalization trend and you've seen it also in manufacturing and other industries.”
Americans and others in the English-language world are used to buying clothing and other products with labels that say “Made in China” or “Made in Bangladesh.” Thanks to the rise of platforms like Facebook and Google, a growing amount of the information being served up in English is now coming from overseas as, albeit without the same kind of labeling.
One surprising area where the impact of this trend is being felt is with Native American news and content.
A few weeks ago, Indian Country Today Media Network, an online and print publisher for Native Americans, announced that it was suspending operations due to the lack of a sustainable business model.
“ICTMN has faced the same challenges that other media outlets have faced,” said a letter from publisher Ray Halbritter. “It is no secret that with the rise of the Internet, traditional publishing outlets have faced unprecedented adversity.”
But while ICTMN had to stop operations, a raft of overseas-based publishers of content about Native Americans continue to forge ahead and experience growth and revenue primarily thanks to Facebook.
TheNativePeople.net, which has two associated Facebook pages with close to half a million fans between them, is run by a man in Kosovo. The website TheIndigenousAmericans.com also pumps out Native American news for visitors coming from its Indigenous People Of America Facebook page, which is approaching 1 million fans, almost twice the number of ICTMN’s. The page has experienced steady growth: It added roughly 200,000 new fans since BuzzFeed News first wrote about it in a December story that identified a slew of Native American publishers based in Kosovo and Vietnam.
A Vietnamese publisher runs WelcomeNative.com and YesWeNative.com, two sites promoted by the Yes We Native Magazine Facebook page, which has more than 350,000 fans. The page says its owner is based in San Francisco, but domain ownership records list the owner as a person named Minh Nhat Tran of Hanoi. Domain owners can list whatever name and location they want in registration records; however, the email address used for both domains has also been listed as the contact for job postings in Vietnam for graphic designers and Facebook page managers, further showing a link to Vietnam. The same person also runs an American news site called USANewToday.com.
Some of the Native American pages and websites earn money from advertising on articles. Many also operate online stores where they sell T-shirts with Native American designs, as well as clothing, mugs, and other items. As reported by BuzzFeed News, these designs are often stolen from actual Native American artists.
“These pages are taking our work and paying for the sponsored posts on Facebook and making tons of money off of us,” said Aaron Silva, the Native American cofounder of The NTVS, a clothing brand in Minnesota.
BuzzFeed News has identified other online publishers in countries including Macedonia, Pakistan, Georgia, Croatia, India, and the Philippines that produce information aimed primarily at US audiences.
“It's clear that those foreign publishers have developed avenues and methods to get their content into the American traffic flow,” said Sarah Thompson, an Indiana woman who operates the Exploiting the Niche Facebook page.
When not homeschooling her children, she hunts down scammers and clickbait artists who target niche information topics. Many of them turn out to be based overseas, she told BuzzFeed News. When asked to name some of the topics where this is the case, she rattled off a list.
“The US military and veterans are popular themes as well as police and police dogs. Anything with animals, animal abuse, wild animals, beautiful nature, flowers, Native Americans, Christianity,” she said. “Really, it could be anything. Any subject I have looked into I have found the corrupt pockets where that community is being exploited.”
Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, an alliance of large digital publishers, told BuzzFeed News the current economics of online content often favor people who excel at gaming platforms, rather than media brands doing reporting and original content creation.
“If proper trust frameworks aren't in place to ensure consumer and advertiser trust, then the automation/farming of the content will move to the lowest cost, ethics, laws available,” he said.
Native American publishers aren’t the only ones competing with — and sometimes losing out to — overseas publishers in a niche aimed at people in the US. As previously reported by BuzzFeed News, the town of Veles, Macedonia, is home to dozens of websites targeting American conservatives which often publish fake news. A recent BuzzFeed News analysis of partisan political news websites and Facebook pages revealed that a page run by a 20-year-old in Macedonia outperforms many of the biggest conservative news Facebook pages run by Americans. BuzzFeed News has also found publishers in Kosovo and Georgia that publish (often fake) news crafted for American conservatives.
Health is another niche attracting overseas publishers. According to domain ownership records from DomainTools, a man in Pakistan named “Kashif Shahzad” owns over 200 domain names, several of which focus on mental health and related topics, including MedicalHealthRecords.us, HealthTimes.info, and GeneralHealthcare.co. Another of his sites, GreatAmericans.world, focuses on fibromyalgia and is heavily promoted from a Facebook page called US Health Care. He also owns DailyMedicalNews.co, which is promoted by a Facebook page called Depression Awareness with close to half a million fans. BuzzFeed News contacted him at the email address listed in his domain registrations but did not receive a reply.
One way the (often plagiarized) content from this network of sites spreads is to have fake Facebook accounts share it in Facebook groups about health topics. Thompson pointed BuzzFeed News to several accounts that were part of a group of interconnected profiles that consistently share articles from the same health sites into Facebook groups. Some of the accounts are also administrators of these groups, which focus on mental health, fibromyalgia, addiction, and medical marijuana, among other topics. Along with the fake accounts, some groups, such as this one about marijuana, have administrators based in Pakistan.
One suspicious account with the name Rabia Anwar is a member of seven Facebook groups about marijuana and five dedicated to fibromyalgia. The account’s profile features a photo of a woman, but earlier photos posted on its timeline clearly show it originally belonged to a man. (The account info is also set to male.) The profile also prominently presents the photo of a Pakistani actress and her family as if it depicts the person behind the account.
Since August, the account’s public posting activity consists entirely of sharing new articles from the network of health sites run from Pakistan into Facebook groups.
Thompson was most alarmed when she identified what she believes are fake Facebook accounts that are active in Facebook groups and present themselves as recovering drug addicts. These accounts repeatedly share content from overseas publishers.
“The thought of these spamming bots infiltrating a support group of recovering addicts made me so mad,” she said. “Some clickbaiter thousands of miles away is violating the trust and privacy these communities afford to each other for mere pennies per click.”
Along with the violation of trust, Thompson is concerned that many overseas publishers in the health vertical simply copy and paste whatever information will grab attention, which can often be false claims about new cures, or misleading health warnings.
“They could be giving them bad information, distracting them from proven treatments with snake oil spam, eroding their trust in their doctor, or even giving them bad information that could harm them,” she said. “It's not a joke, it’s not harmless. The heroin epidemic in the Midwest where I live is really bad. Lots of people are dying.”
Health is also a focus for Macedonian publishers. Wired magazine reported on Aleksandar and Borce Velkovski, two brothers who got rich from HealthyFoodHouse.com, a website filled with health tips and recipes. BuzzFeed News also found dozens of health-focused domain names registered to people in Macedonia.
That country is in fact home to a cottage industry of websites focused on motorcycles, American muscle cars, horses, and other topics.
The glut of English-language publishers in Macedonia is partly thanks to a man named Mirko Ceselkoski. More than a decade ago, he figured out how to make money by running websites about cars and other niche topics aimed at Americans. When he met with BuzzFeed News in July in Skopje, Ceselkoski provided a business card that described him as “The Man Who Helped Donald Trump Win US Elections (me and my students from Veles).”
Ceselkoski claims credit for Trump’s win because many of the young publishers in Veles took a course he offers on how to make money with English-language websites. Ceselkoski charged $425, which is roughly equivalent to the average monthly salary in the country.
“I was instructing my students that they should write news aimed at American people,” Ceselkoski said.
He denies telling students to publish fake news, but does instruct them to copy a few paragraphs from a story that’s performing well on Facebook and create a new story from that. It's the content equivalent of an overseas factory pumping out knockoffs of the latest fashion trend.
ICTMN / The Indigenous American
Plagiarism is a standard tactic of low-quality overseas publishers. All of the content BuzzFeed News reviewed on the health sites run from Pakistan was stolen from other websites. (There was even one story about antidepressants stolen from BuzzFeed.)
The same is true for players in the Native American niche. TheIndigenousAmericans.com recently featured a Q&A with actor Adam Beach. That interview was stolen word-for-word from Indian Country Today Media Network.
The same plagiarism frequently occurs in the world of fake political news, too. As previously detailed by BuzzFeed News, multiple publishers in Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, and Georgia plagiarize the fake articles published on a group of websites run by a man in Maine. The man, Christopher Blair, calls himself a liberal troll and claims he publishes the fake stories — such as “BREAKING: Hillary Clinton Personally Funded Antifa Terrorists With $7.1 Million Bankroll” — to expose the ignorance of American conservatives. After months of having his content stolen, he managed to get some of their websites and Facebook pages shut down.
“They will copy, paste, and post as many times in a day as they can. They steal content from pages with a lot of shares,” he said.
Sometimes overseas publishers mix their topics to puzzling effect. A website called USMedicalCouncil.com shows new visitors a pop-up message to like the Fibro & Chronic Pain Center Facebook page. That page constantly posts articles connected to health spammers in Pakistan. However, USMedicalCouncil.com recently switched topics and now posts hyperpartisan political stories. One of its most recent is a completely false story alleging incest in the Trump family.
TheNativePeople.net, which is run from Kosovo, is just as likely to publish a list of "home remedies" to help with clogged arteries, which itself is an article copied from a health site run by a Macedonian, according to domain registration records.
But not all overseas publishers working in English operate at the lowest end of the value chain. Bored Panda publishes viral content about art, design, and other topics. It frequently works with the original artists to create stories. The company was founded in Lithuania, and that’s where the majority of its staff is based. Owner Tomas Banisauskas did not respond to interview requests from BuzzFeed News, but he did publish a post on Medium titled “How we built a global media business with $5/month.” The $5 in question is the cost of his initial web hosting bill.
“I was laser-focused on profits from day one,” wrote Banisauskas, who studied business at Vilnius University. “The idea was to create content that people would share on social networks, which would bring free traffic back to my website. All this traffic then could be monetised with AdSense banners.”
He said Bored Panda succeeded by focusing on publishing a smaller number of quality posts, rather than churning out a large number each day. This, and what he said was a decision to avoid using clickbait headlines, helped his site avoid a crash in traffic that hit viral sites such as Upworthy when Facebook changed its algorithm, according to Banisauskas.
Bored Panda
Paul Sakuma / AP
Three Facebook users are challenging newly-disclosed search warrants for their account information, arguing that the warrants are overbroad and would chill political activists from engaging in constitutionally-protected speech online.
Federal prosecutors obtained search warrants in February seeking a broad range of information from Facebook about the three accounts over an approximately 90-day period. A judge initially blocked Facebook from telling users about the warrants at the government’s request, but federal prosecutors this month dropped the secrecy demand after Facebook and civil liberties and electronic privacy groups challenged the gag orders.
Now that the account holders know the government wants their information, they’re going to court.
Lacy MacAuley, one of the account holders, told BuzzFeed News it was a “total shock” to get an email from Facebook about a week and a half ago alerting her to the warrant for her account. She called the warrant, issued by the US attorney's office in Washington, DC, an “absolutely ridiculous invasion of privacy” and a “really dangerous move towards fascism.”
“Jeff Sessions doesn’t need to see my family photos. Jeff Sessions doesn’t need to see my conversations with a romantic partner. Jeff Sessions does not need to see people sending me their private information,” she said.
Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, the account holders filed papers on Thursday asking a judge to either quash the warrants or, if the judge isn’t willing to go that far, order that an independent “special master” search the records instead of law enforcement officials.
ACLU attorney Scott Michelman told BuzzFeed News that the case is about more than the privacy and constitutional rights of the three Facebook users. At stake is how much leeway prosecutors have in an array of cases to sift through the vast amount of personal information stored on sites like Facebook, he said.
“The warrants at issue authorize precisely the type of fishing expedition that the Fourth Amendment prohibits,” Michelman said. “A huge quantity of information, both personal information about communications with romantic partners, and medical and psychiatric information and family photos, will be released. And equally if not more troubling ... the political associations and political activities of both the users and third parties with whom they communicate, will also be revealed.”
A spokesman for the US attorney’s office in Washington declined to comment.
Thursday’s filings reveal for the first time what was suspected when BuzzFeed News first reported the gag order fight in July — that the February warrants relate to the criminal prosecution of people arrested at protests in Washington, DC, during President Donald Trump’s inauguration. According to the search warrants, which were previously under seal but included in the ACLU’s court papers, prosecutors are seeking any information that relates to alleged rioting on Jan. 20.
Facebook does not object to the account holders' motion to quash the search warrants, according to the ACLU’s court papers.
More than 200 people were arrested in downtown Washington on Jan. 20 and charged with felony rioting and property destruction. According to the government, the alleged riots caused more than $100,000 in property damage. Just under 200 cases are still pending. The defendants will be tried in small groups, with the first trial scheduled to start in November.
As the government and defense lawyers prepare for the first trial, though, prosecutors are still fighting in court over whether and to what extent they can search electronic information related to the protests and the arrests.
In the Facebook case, two of the accounts belong to individuals involved in planning Inauguration Day protests, MacAuley and Legba Carrefour. Neither has been criminally charged in connection with the Jan. 20 arrests. The third account is called disruptj20, and it served as a hub for organizing anti-Trump protests on Jan. 20. According to court papers, the disruptj20 page is owned by Emmelia Talarico, who also is not facing criminal charges.
Prosecutors want to use what’s known as the “two-step” process to access and search the Facebook accounts. Under that protocol, law enforcement would get access to a large cache of records — which may include information outside the scope of the search warrant — and then conduct a targeted search for information that does fall under the warrant to seize.
Prosecutors separately have been fighting in court over a search warrant for information from a website that was used to coordinate anti-Trump protests on Inauguration Day. A judge ruled that prosecutors can use the two-step process in that effort, but only after the judge approves their search procedures, given the free speech-related issues at play. The judge also said that he would require the government to submit for his review a list of records that they believed would fall under the search warrant to seize.
The government and the company that hosts the website, Dreamhost Inc., are still litigating over the search plan proposed by prosecutors.
In the Facebook case, the ACLU isn’t challenging the two-step process as a whole, but is arguing that in cases that implicate political speech, there should be limits on what information prosecutors have access to, how they search it, how they store it, and how long they can keep it. If Facebook complies with the warrants, the records it would produce to the government to search would include users' messages, posts, photos, personal information, and connections with other accounts, as well as information on people who "liked" or otherwise interacted with the disruptj20 page.
Michelman said that it was difficult to say what combination of safeguards would satisfy his clients, but that it was the government’s burden to come up with a plan that satisfies the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that searches be narrowly tailored to information that the government has probable cause to seize.
“In light of the increasing ubiquity of social media and electronic communication, these types of demands will only increase,” Michelman said. “It’s vital if courts are going to preserve the Fourth Amendment’s role in prohibiting government fishing expeditions, that they impose some constraints on the government’s authority at this stage, before government rummaging through electronic accounts becomes commonplace and accepted practice.”
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Donald Trump took to Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg responded on Facebook.
On Wednesday, the Facebook CEO responded to the president's comments that his company "was always anti-Trump" with a bulleted statement that attempted to downplay the notion that the social network influenced the 2016 election for either party.
"The facts suggest the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was different from what most are saying," Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook.
It's been a contentious month for Facebook after the company acknowledged efforts by foreign entities to manipulate the race on its platform by buying targeted ads. Last week, the company said it would have copies of more than 3,000 ads with ties to Russian actors to give to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, with Zuckerberg announcing a new policy with for advertising so-called dark posts. On Wednesday, the company, along with Google and Twitter, were invited to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Nov. 1.
A source close to Facebook confirmed that the company had received the invite, but that it had not decided who to send in front of the committee.
"Trump says Facebook is against him," wrote Zuckerberg. "Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like. That's what running a platform for all ideas looks like.
Earlier on Wednesday, Trump wrote in the first of a two-part tweet that Facebook had been opposed to his candidacy: "Facebook was always anti-Trump," he said. "The Networks were always anti-Trump hence,Fake News, @nytimes(apologized) & @WaPo were anti-Trump. Collusion?"
@realDonaldTrump / Twitter / Via Twitter: @realDonaldTrump
In his post, Zuckerberg attempted to outline the positives that his company brought to the election. He noted that "more people had a voice in this election than ever before" because of Facebook and notes that all the candidates had Facebook pages through which they interacted with tens of millions of followers. The post, however, made no mention of the fake news and information that the platform helped to proliferate.
"After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea," Zuckerberg wrote. "Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive."
The Facebook CEO also hinted that he may be in favor of campaign spending reforms for online advertising. "Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That's 1000x more than any problematic ads we've found," he said.
Since the election, Zuckerberg has stayed out of Trump's orbit. In December, during a meeting of technology leaders at Manhattan's Trump Tower, Facebook opted to send Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to sit down with the then-president-elect. He also did not attend a similar meeting for technology leaders in June at the White House, with the company reportedly citing "scheduling conflicts" at the time.
Zuckerberg has also largely avoided saying Trump's name in public settings. He discussed "fearful voices calling for building walls" at a keynote for the company's F8 conference in April 2016 and made a veiled criticism at the presidential administration's approach to immigration at Harvard University's May commencement, but did not mention the president's name at either event. Similarly in a Facebook post criticizing the president's decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, he did not name Trump.
It remains to be seen if Zuckerberg or another representative for Facebook will testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee in November.
Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook / Via Facebook: zuck
Stephen Lam / Reuters
Facebook, Twitter and Google officials have been called to testify publicly before the Senate Intelligence Committee on November 1 about Russian attempts to use social media to sway last year’s presidential election after Facebook revealed that a Russian troll operation had purchased more than 3,000 political ads on the platform.
The news, first reported by Recode, was confirmed to BuzzFeed News by a source familiar with the matter.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is leading congressional investigations into Russian election interference, has increased its scrutiny of Facebook, in particular, following its disclosure earlier this month that fake accounts and pages on the site linked to a Russian troll farm spent approximately $100,000 on political ads during the presidential race.
A person familiar with the situation said that Facebook is considering the invitation, but has not decided which executives to send to the hearing. Representatives for Google and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declined to confirm the invitations to reporters on Wednesday, but said he had spoken to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently. Rep. Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he had also spoken with Zuckerberg.
Burr said Tuesday members want to hear from someone at Facebook during the public hearing who can speak about “what they need to do to identify foreign money that might come in and what procedures, if any, should be put in law to make sure that elections are not intruded by foreign entities."
“Clearly it's the bigger companies that we think might have been used and we're working with them to acquire the type of data that we need to look at a public hearing,” Burr told reporters.
The planned public hearing, during which senators will grill officials from all three companies, comes as Facebook is under fire for allowing advertisers to target anti-Semitic interests and being slow to acknowledge efforts by foreign actors to manipulate the 2016 election using the social media platform. Some Democratic senators are reportedly already working on legislation to require greater ad transparency from Facebook and others.
Facebook announced last week that it would give both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees copies of the more than 3,000 Russia-linked ads. When asked on Tuesday if he had seen the ads, Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the committee, said: "Soon. Really soon. This week soon."
Burr declined to say whether he had viewed the ads, but he said the committee has “traded a lot of documents with Facebook” and that the social media giant has “been incredibly helpful to us.”
Burr added that the committee is in conversation “with everybody in the social platform arena that we think can provide us insight into whether there was any foreign manipulation of their sites.”
“I think their actions just last week indicate that they believe that it's important to get out in front of this and share as much of it as possible," Burr said of Facebook.
Facebook announced last week it would publicly display so-called “dark posts,” which advertisers buy to promote to specific audiences but that remain concealed from the broader public. “We will work with others to create a new standard for transparency in online political ads,” Zuckerberg said in a live video address announcing the move, among others measures the company is taking in an attempt to increase transparency.
Asked if it, too, would reveal dark posts, Twitter told BuzzFeed News it has nothing new to announce.
The plan to hold a open hearing with Facebook, Twitter and Google comes as the panel is expected to begin publicly interviewing select high-profile witnesses in October, including Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer.
Small Stuff for BuzzFeed News; Getty Images (4); Alamy (2)
The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, a $22 million federally funded program that pushes healthy-eating strategies in almost 30,000 schools, is partly based on studies that contained flawed — or even missing — data.
The main scientist behind the work, Cornell University professor Brian Wansink, has made headlines for his research into the psychology of eating. His experiments have found, for example, that women who put cereal on their kitchen counters weigh more than those who don’t, and that people will pour more wine if they’re holding the glass than if it's sitting on a table. Over the past two decades he’s written two popular books and more than 100 research papers, and enjoyed widespread media coverage (including on BuzzFeed).
Yet over the past year, Wansink and his “Food and Brand Lab” have come under fire from scientists and statisticians who’ve spotted all sorts of red flags — including data inconsistencies, mathematical impossibilities, errors, duplications, exaggerations, eyebrow-raising interpretations, and instances of self-plagiarism — in 50 of his studies.
Journals have so far retracted three of these papers and corrected at least seven. Now, emails obtained by BuzzFeed News through public information requests reveal for the first time that Wansink and his Cornell colleague David Just are also in the process of correcting yet another study, “Attractive names sustain increased vegetable intake in schools,” published in Preventive Medicine in 2012.
The most recent retraction — a rare move typically seen as a black mark on a scientist’s reputation — happened last Thursday, when JAMA Pediatrics pulled a similar study, also from 2012, titled “Can branding improve school lunches?”
Brian Wansink in 2007.
Stan Honda / AFP / Getty Images
Both studies claimed that children are more likely to choose fruits and vegetables when they’re jazzed up, such as when carrots are called “X-Ray Vision Carrots” and when apples have Sesame Street stickers. The underlying theory is that fun, descriptive branding will not only make an eater more aware of the food, but will “also raise one’s taste expectations,” as the scientists explained in one of the papers.
The studies have been cited more than 75 times by others, according to Web of Science, and were funded by a grant of nearly $99,000 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Eating Research program. The foundation told BuzzFeed News it hasn’t awarded him any grants since then.
The two studies have also been touted as evidence for the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, cofounded by Wansink and Just in 2010. It promotes “simple evidence-based strategies” to encourage students to make healthy choices, participate in federally subsidized lunch programs, and waste less food. The USDA has funded $8.4 million in research grants related to the program to date, according to an agency spokesperson. Since 2014, it’s also awarded nearly $14 million in training grants. Almost 30,000 schools have adopted those techniques, and the government pays each one up to $2,000 for doing so. (The program says it’s also funded by Target and Wansink’s Cornell lab.)
One of the program’s recommendations is that school cafeterias feature a fruit or vegetable of the day and label it with “a creative, descriptive name.” Suggestions include “orange squeezers,” “monkey phones (bananas),” “snappy apples,” “cool-as-a-cucumber slices,” and “sweetie pie sweet potatoes.” Branding food in this way “can increase consumption by over 30%,” according to the program’s website. As proof, the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement cites the JAMA Pediatrics and Preventive Medicine studies, among others.
The USDA told BuzzFeed News that it has been talking to Cornell’s Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs (the BEN Center), which administers the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, about some of the allegedly flawed research. The agency “believes that scientific integrity is important, and that program and policy decisions should be based on strong evidence,” wrote USDA spokesperson Amanda Heitkamp.
“We have discussed these concerns with the BEN Center, and they have plans to address them in consultation with the Cornell University Office of Research Integrity and Assurance,” Heitkamp said. But the evidence behind the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, she noted, comes from other work as well. “Smarter Lunchroom strategies are based upon widely researched principles of behavioral economics, as well as a strong body of practice that supports their ongoing use.”
A spokesperson for the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement echoed this sentiment, pointing to studies done by non-Cornell researchers that support the program’s strategies.
Cornell and Wansink did not return requests for comment, and Just declined to speak with BuzzFeed News. In previous public comments, Wansink dismissed some of the errors as minor and inconsequential to the studies’ overall conclusions. He also claimed that his studies have been replicated by other researchers. “One reason some of these findings are cited so much is because other researchers find the same types of results,” he told Retraction Watch in February. In March, he told the Chronicle of Higher Education that field studies should be taken with a grain of salt, as opposed to research done in a controlled setting like a laboratory. “Science is messy in a lot of ways,” he said.
But his critics take these problems very seriously, pointing out how rapidly his research has been adopted into the real world.
“It’s not sufficient evidence to roll out interventions in thousands of schools, in my opinion,” said Eric Robinson, a behavioral scientist at the University of Liverpool, who has found that several of Wansink’s studies cited by the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement made the strategies sound more effective than the data showed.
Others are disappointed that Wansink has, by and large, failed to adequately address most of the alleged mistakes — particularly when the entire field of psychological research is being dissected for studies that fail to hold up in repeat experiments.
Tim van der Zee, a graduate student at Leiden University in the Netherlands and one of the first researchers to spot errors in Wansink’s work, said that aside from correcting and sharing data for a handful of the challenged papers, the professor, his coauthors, and Cornell “remain inexplicably hidden in silence.”
“One of the fundamental principles of the scientific method is transparency — to conduct research in a way that can be assessed, verified, and reproduced,” he told BuzzFeed News. “This is not optional — it is imperative.”
Wansink began drawing scrutiny last November when, in a now-deleted blog post, he praised a grad student for taking the data from a “failed study” of an all-you-can-eat Italian lunch buffet and reanalyzing it multiple times until she came up with interesting results. These findings — that, for example, men overeat when women are around — eventually resulted in a series of published studies about pizza consumption.
To outside scientists, it reeked of statistical manipulation — that the data had been sliced and diced so much that the results were just false positives. It’s a problem that has cropped up again and again in social science research, and that a growing number of scientists are trying to address by replicating studies and calling out errors on social media.
Over the winter, van der Zee saw that Wansink’s blog post was accruing dozens of disapproving comments. He teamed up with two other scientists who were similarly intrigued: Nicholas Brown, also a graduate student in the Netherlands, and Jordan Anaya, a computational biologist in Virginia. At first they exchanged emails with Wansink about apparent errors in four of the pizza papers, van der Zee said. But when he stopped replying to them, they decided to go public with the 150 errors they’d found in the four papers. Then Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, accused Wansink’s lab of manipulating the data — or using “junk science,” in his words — to dress up their conclusions.
These critiques soon captured journalists’ attention. In early February, Retraction Watch interviewed Wansink about his disputed work, and New York magazine declared that “A Popular Diet-Science Lab Has Been Publishing Really Shoddy Research.”
The next day, Wansink wrote an email to more than 40 friends and collaborators with the subject line “Moving forward after Pizza Gate.” He called the barrage of criticism “cyber-bullying,” and seemed to dismiss the errors, explaining that most stemmed from “missing data, rounding errors, and [some numbers] being off by 1 or 2.”
He told the other scientists that the mistakes didn’t change the conclusions of the four papers, and sought to reassure them that they were on the right side of history.
“For a group of people who are so innovative, so hard-working, and who try so tirelessly to make the world healthier, this could be disheartening,” he wrote. “Fortunately, we have too many other great ideas and solutions that keep our eyes fixed on the horizon in front of us.”
The horizon, as it turned out, was darker than he anticipated, as shown in dozens of emails between Wansink and collaborators who work at public universities, obtained via records requests by BuzzFeed News.
After helping to dissect the pizza papers, Brown turned his sights on the now-retracted “Can branding improve school lunches?”
The study claimed that elementary school students were more likely to choose an apple instead of a cookie if the apple had an Elmo sticker on it. The takeaway: Popular brands and cartoons could successfully promote healthy fare over junk food.
In a blog post, Brown expressed concern about how the data had been crunched, and confusion about how exactly the experiment had worked. He noted that a bar graph looked much different in an earlier version. And, he pointed out, the scientists had said their findings could help “preliterate” children — which seemed odd, since the children in the study were ages 8 to 11.
In yet more scathing blog posts, Anaya and data scientist James Heathers pointed out mistakes and inconsistencies in the Preventive Medicine study, “Attractive names sustain increased vegetable intake in schools,” which claimed that elementary school students ate more carrots when the vegetables were dubbed “X-ray Vision Carrots.”
Both papers were written by Wansink and Just, as well as Collin Payne, an associate professor of marketing at New Mexico State University. (Payne declined to comment.)
Wansink wrote to his coauthors and a few others who had helped with the papers on Feb. 21: “Back here in Ithaca we’re busy with a bunch of crazy stuff.”
“One of the things we’re facing is people challenging some of our old papers,” Wansink wrote. “What our critics want to do is to show there [sic] are bogus so they can challenge all of the Smarter Lunchrooms policies.”
But there was a problem: He couldn’t find the data for either study. “We can’t seem to find them,” he wrote. “Any chance you have them in any files.”
The following week, Brown blogged about several papers in which Wansink appeared to have plagiarized from his previous work, and New York magazine wrote about it. Wansink wrote an apologetic email to several deans at Cornell, trying to explain the “newest saga.” He admitted that there were duplications, but believed them all to be justified, saying at one point that certain paragraphs were “important enough to be repeated.”
“For someone who’s been a noncontroversial person for 56 years, this has been an upsetting month, and I’m ashamed of the difficulties it has given you, and our great Dyson School, College, and University,” Wansink wrote.
"All the numbers seem to be within one baby carrot of each other."
