On Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015

Nate Silver to Vox: Stop stealing our charts!

Yo, @voxdotcom: Y'all should probably stop stealing people's charts without proper attribution. You do this all the time, to 538 & others. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2015

FiveThirtyEight founder and statistics guru Nate Silver has accused Ezra Klein's Vox.com of stealing other people's charts without attribution.

"Yo, @voxdotcom: Y'all should probably stop stealing people's charts without proper attribution," he tweeted Monday. "You do this all the time, to 538 & others."

Silver wasn't alone: Anthony De Rosa, the editor-in-chief at Circa, a mobile news app, joined the fray, claiming that he'd reached out to Vox.com content director Max Fisher "about this about dozen times and he never responds."

Klein did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday morning, even as he continued to tweet out links to Vox.com articles.

UPDATE (12:24 p.m.): Silver fires again:

Only about 20% of the maps @VoxMaps tweets were actually made by Vox. Always a link to a Vox story, rarely to original source. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2015

UPDATE (4:44 p.m.): Klein published a lengthy response to Silver, with an examination of Vox's general approach to aggregation:

Our policy, to our staff, is simple: any time we use work created by someone else, we need clear attribution to the original author and a link back to the source. When appropriate, we should do more than that: we should add to the conversation with new facts, ideas, or reporting. ... The problem comes when we do it poorly — and in those cases, we deserve to get called out. Take the post that frustrated Silver. The attribution there was clear. The first line reads, "Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight put together this great graphic summarizing the popularity of various key political players and how well-known they are to the general public." ... The post went on to argue with Silver's interpretation of the data — this wasn't just aggregation, it was actually a debate. ... But the post didn't include a link. This was carelessness, not malice, but it's a violation of Vox's internal standards. Our policy requires attribution, and any time we fail that policy is inexcusable. It's a betrayal of what makes the web positive-sum. Silver's right to be upset by it. He has my apologies.