Screenshot of a BuzzFeed News article titled “A Man In China Apparently Ended Up Riddled With Tapeworm Parasites”, showing BuzzFeed’s own coverage of the viral Chinese tapeworm story before the same material later became part of the wider dispute over supposedly fake or unreliable foreign news. The significance of this record is not simply that BuzzFeed published a dramatic medical story from China, but that it had itself treated the story as legitimate, shareable and entertaining viral content at the time, using the striking medical scans and “riddled with tapeworms” framing in much the same way as other outlets. In the later BuzzFeed/CEN narrative, however, the story was treated as something requiring explanation once a Snopes item had raised doubts, even though that item did not conclusively prove the story was fake. The record is therefore useful evidence of the inconsistency at the heart of BuzzFeed’s approach: BuzzFeed was willing to enjoy and publish the viral foreign story when it suited its own audience, then later rely on a thin or disputed debunking angle to criticise others for doing substantially the same thing.