Tom Phillips Alerts Ben Smith About Story That Would Prove MailOnline Published CEN Fake News

This 6 January 2015 email shows Tom Phillips giving BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith a “heads up” that Craig Silverman was due to meet him about Emergent and that Phillips and Alan White were starting work with Silverman on a story about CEN. The document is significant because Phillips frames CEN’s importance through its relationship with highly viral stories that “go big on sites like MailOnline”, saying BuzzFeed increasingly suspected CEN fabricated “many or even all” of them. That wording is important because it records the CEN investigation being pitched upwards to BuzzFeed’s global editor-in-chief through the commercial and competitive significance of MailOnline’s traffic-driving use of CEN material, before BuzzFeed had completed the verification work needed to support such a sweeping allegation. It should be read alongside the Silverman budget documents, the early “CEN bollocks list” and “few definitive fakes plus dodgy-sounding ones” threads, and the later “easy bit” documents, because together they help show how Silverman’s role, Emergent, MailOnline’s use of CEN and BuzzFeed’s wider fake-news narrative converged at a very early stage in the investigation.

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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