Buzzfeed News recent discovery “Blanked-Out Spots On China’s Maps Helped Us Uncover Xinjiang’s Camps” turns out to have much more, and much less, to the real story.

Numerous people have investigated these claims and found that there are no “gray tiles” to be found and where they were alleged to be covering up so-called camps instead there were typical buildings including a residential apartment and there was no censoring of the satellite images to be found (original tweet thread here, more here.)

Note that BuzzfeedNews is a highly awarded team of investigative journalists including Pulitzer prize winners and a reporter in the White House press pool and is not the main Buzzfeed site, so this isn’t just some trash-tier hack who is in a race to the bottom against The Daily Mail but instead it’s supposed to be reputable journalism.

The absolute state of western journalism when a random person on twitter has more ethics and is more diligent than a trained, experienced team of professionals with the resources of an entire organization at their fingertips.

And this is supposed to be the best evidence that they can come up with to “prove” that the camps exist? Maybe the blank spaces were inside them all along, in the places where the reporter’s brain and journalistic integrity is supposed to be?