BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising Pressure

Re:BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising P... by kmfrk on Sunday April 19, 2015 @06:31AM (#9402673)

I think semantics are important here, especially in a technical context.

There are several way to "unpublish" an article:

- Retract it

- Delete it

- Completely erase it from the web

What BuzzFeed did in at least two cases was delete the articles and include them in their robots.txt, which, at least to me, is completely bonkers.

It is one thing for a publication to retract an article, but it is an entirely different thing to make an effort of making it seem as if they never existed to begin with.

It's that kind of mentality that leads you to think that even BuzzFeed don't think highly of their own articles, where you can always make it up in volume.

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Re:BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising P... by jamesbrownuhh on Sunday April 19, 2015 @06:42AM (#9402698)

Putting the article URL in robots.txt stops the Wayback machine from displaying it - that's why they do it, just in case the Internet Archive happened to have a cached copy of the article.

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Re:BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising P... by aw3c2 on Sunday April 19, 2015 @06:52AM (#9402719)

And that's an attempt to re-write history or at least remove something from it.

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