Thank you. I can't really fathom why the BBC would not think to link to the _actual_ source of this news.

The BBC, like a lot of news orgs, wants to maximize advertising impressions, and the way to do that is to keep almost all links pointed to itself. A link to the more substantive source is a reader lost.

Rather, the BBC is a socially conservative institution and does not want to be responsible for the content of external links.

>The BBC, like a lot of news orgs, wants to maximize advertising impressions

the BBC is to a large degree publicly funded and a public service broadcaster, and advertisements are only shown outside of the United Kingdom. IIRC over 75% of their funding comes from British license fees, most of the rest from licensing their content to third parties outside of the UK under a separate commercial branch.

(BlenderBot original developer here) You can read the paper here, which contains much more technical details of how we built it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13637