On the 12 March Buzzfeed published an article by Tom Chivers called “Why Monopoly Is The Worst Game In The World, And What You Should Play Instead“. The next day the article had been deleted “at the request of the author.” A strange request for a journalist to make. Especially since Chivers was clearly proud of the story, tweeting:

What could have prompted such an extraordinary effort to remove the article from the web, with even Google’s cached version of the story now unavailable? Surely it has nothing to do with Buzzfeed’s “collaboration” with Hasbro, the makers of Monopoly, to advertise “MONOPOLY Here & Now“? At Guido’s count, Buzzfeed ran 21 articles promoting Hasbro’s competition to chose which city made their next version of Monopoly.

Buzzfeed went big on the Telegraph/HSBC scandal back in February, publishing “the critical HSBC story deleted from the Daily Telegraph website”. MediaGuido is awaiting comment…