How Upworthy stays viral yet trustworthy

A viral story with a clickable headline still has to be trustworthy, says Upworthy’s Matt Savener.

After Upworthy errantly published a fear-mongering, pseudo-science video analysis of a Chicken McNugget that it had to apologize for back in 2013, the viral content site realized it needed to earn its readers’ trust again.

They apologized in a totally Upworthy way — full of GIFs of the sad-faced employees who messed up and screenshots of all the Facebook comments explaining how stupid the video was — and set up a permanent corrections page and fact-checking policy.

Upworthy made what Savener (perhaps sarcastically) described as a bold public statement: “We fact-check everything on Upworthy.”

Savener is now the standards chief at Upworthy. He’s in charge of making sure everything Upworthy publishes is factually accurate and edited.

Despite not doing traditional journalism, Savener says Upworthy still values traditional standards of accuracy, trust and reliability.

Savener and the two copy editors on his team watch out for and give extra care to problem areas:

• Scientific and medical “breakthroughs”
  • Journalists sometimes don’t understand the science and think something scientific is a bigger deal than it is.
  • Scientists don’t always communicate how big of a deal something is in easily understood terms.
• Food, especially those labeled GMOs, “natural,” organic or “healthy”

• Obesity, body image and shaming.
  • Not every overweight person is unhealthy. Not every skinny person is healthy.
  • Upworthy instead tries to find stories that empower all body types.
• Gender, racial and other biases
  • The editing team works as a sounding board to help prevent stories that may be racist, transphobic or victim-blaming from happening.
  • Or, better yet, Upworthy provides minority groups with a platform to tell their own stories.
• Cultural appropriation or colorblindness
• White savior narratives
• Partisanship
  • Upworthy doesn’t claim to be objective or tell both sides like traditional journalism, but it does try to call out good and bad behavior from both political parties without taking sides.

It helps that Upworthy doesn’t turn things around too quickly. Savener said they only publish 30 to 50 stories a week so they can put a lot more care into individual posts. That also means sometimes something wrong that went viral will get debunked before Upworthy gets around to posting it.

The team is small and long-distance — Savener lives in California and two copy editors live in Illinois and Nebraska — but they communicate constantly on Slack and email. And they still manage to communicate outside of work. Savener said the editorial director bought them all Snuggies last month, so the three Upworthy copy editors drank beers together on a Google video call wearing their sleeved blankets.

It sounds dorky, he said, but it helps a lot.

ACES newsroom member Emily Donovan is a student at the University of Kansas.