This 14–15 January 2015 email chain shows Alan White, Tom Phillips and Craig Silverman tracing Chinese viral stories through Weibo, Sina, Xinhua, the Mirror, MailOnline, Metro, the New York Post and other sites as part of the early CEN investigation. The chain is significant because it shows BuzzFeed trying to reconstruct story origins through links, watermarks, pixelation, reverse-search logic and language help, while still making assumptions about what CEN had supplied and how Chinese material had moved through the viral-news system. Phillips notes that they need “someone Chinese” to understand one source trail, while White suggests getting a Mandarin speaker for “a couple days work looking at story spread”. Silverman says one example helps provide evidence on the “content theft side of things” because, according to “the guy in Austria”, CEN would “grab anything from anywhere scrub out watermarks and push it out as their own”. The document is also useful because Silverman says he has found someone claiming that, after following up some CEN stories, sources quoted by CEN said they had never been interviewed, but he is still “working to get some names”. That shows the allegations were being built before named source evidence had been secured. The wider value is that this early investigation was still a process of online reconstruction, suspicion and attempted language verification, not settled proof of what CEN itself had done.