After a flurry of criticism online, BuzzFeed on Friday reinstated two posts that had recently been removed from the site.
Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief, said that he had overreacted when asking editors to delete them.
One of the posts that was taken down was critical of an advertising campaign for the cosmetics brand Dove, which advertises on the site. After Gawker reported on the item’s disappearance on Thursday, Smith posted a note from editors that suggested it was removed because it did not fit BuzzFeed’s tone or editorial mission.
“We are trying not to do hot takes,” Smith wrote on Twitter.
However, on Friday, the British Web site Guido Fawkes said BuzzFeed had recently removed another post that was critical of the board game Monopoly, shortly after it entered a deal with Hasbro, the company behind the game.
Smith said in a note on Friday that he had decided to restore both posts.
“I blew it,” Smith wrote in a note to the BuzzFeed staff. “Twice in the last couple of months, I’ve asked editors — over their better judgement and without any respect to our standards or process — to delete recently published posts from the site.”
Both involved the same issue: “my overreaction to questions we’ve been wrestling with about the place of personal opinion pieces on our site,” he said.
He had acted impulsively, he said, but had not removed the posts because of advertiser pressure.
“I field complaints all the time from companies and individuals, including advertisers, and I see it as my job to shield you from that pressure,” Smith said.
Smith said by e-mail that neither Dove nor Hasbro had complained about the items that were removed. He declined to comment further.
BuzzFeed’s editorial standards, published on the site, say editorial posts “should never be deleted for reasons related to their content, or because a subject or stakeholder has asked you to do so.”
However, the standards also specify that the site does not “write about ads that are running on BuzzFeed unless they are genuinely newsworthy.”
The Dove post, which was published on Wednesday, criticized a commercial in which women were asked to categorize themselves as average or beautiful, part of a broader campaign for the brand that has focused on self-image.
Dove “wants to tell us how we feel about ourselves. And then fix it for us. With soap,” the post said.
It was deleted and replaced with a sentence that said: “We pulled this post because it is not consistent with the tone of BuzzFeed Life,” the site’s lifestyle section.
The post on Monopoly, published in February, was headlined: “Why Monopoly is the worst game in the world and what you should play instead.”
The site was criticized last year after Gawker discovered that it had deleted thousands of posts without informing readers. At the time, Smith told the Poynter Institute for Journalism that the posts that were deleted dated to the beginning of BuzzFeed “when people were really not thinking of themselves as doing journalism; they saw themselves as working in a lab.”
Many of the posts “were technically broken and some of them were kind of done as inside jokes,” he told Poynter.
Others contained humor that had not aged well or were games made in an outdated technical format, he added.
BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and Kenneth Lerer, two of the founders of the Huffington Post, as something of an experiment in creating viral content.
It quickly grew to become a Web traffic behemoth and expanded into more traditional journalism. Smith, who was a prominent political writer at Politico, was hired in 2011. He has since built a news organization with its own corps of foreign and domestic correspondents. It recently snared its first interview with US President Barack Obama.
Last year, it closed a new US$50 million investment from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The investment valued the company at the time at approximately US$850 million.
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