Luke Lewis Calls KFC Story “Totally Fake” Before It Is Dropped From BuzzFeed’s CEN Case

This 28 October 2014 BuzzFeed email chain shows Luke Lewis discussing viral news and describing CEN as one of the agencies that had “arisen to meet the demand for viral bullshit”, while pointing to two examples: the Chinese woman who reportedly spent a week in KFC after being dumped by her boyfriend, and the Chinese backpacker story that he described as “thin” and difficult to debunk despite being “almost certainly” fake. The document is significant because the KFC story appears here as an early example in BuzzFeed’s developing CEN narrative, but later became awkward for that narrative because it was not in fact a simple fake-news example. The chain is also useful because it captures BuzzFeed criticising the wider viral-news ecosystem while BuzzFeed’s own later internal records show it having to search for, identify and deal with CEN-linked material that had appeared on its own pages, creating the same kind of source-use contradiction it was preparing to criticise in other publishers. The Chinese backpacker example is also important because the underlying issue was more complex than “CEN fabricated a fake story”: the story had already circulated in Chinese media and involved a company press release, meaning CEN’s role in any later revelation that it was a publicity stunt was not the same as inventing the claim. It should be read alongside BuzzFeed’s later sample-selection, “easy bit”, Chinese-language verification and internal CEN-use documents, because it helps show how early assumptions about viral stories being fake fed into the investigation, while examples that did not support the clean fake-news narrative could be narrowed, reframed or removed from the final case.

Source

Part of Central European News & Mike Leidig v BuzzFeed (US Second Circuit Libel Case) – BF Case Documents

Europe Media Published 1 May 2026 at 21:09 Source: 1 November 2016