David Mikkelson, co-founder and CEO of prominent fact-checker Snopes.com has admitted to lifted material from dozens of articles done by mainstream news outlets over the past several years, calling the plagiarism “serious lapses in judgment.”

Mikkelson included material lifted from the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and others to scoop up web traffic from at least 2015 to 2019, according to a report by BuzzFeed News.

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While indulging in plagiarism, Mikkelson used his own name, a generic Snopes byline, and a pseudonym. The lifted material ranged from single sentences and whole paragraphs on such subjects as same-sex marriage and the death of David Bowie, without citing the sources, BuzzFeed and Snopes said.

He has been suspended from editorial production pending the conclusion of an internal review but remains CEO and a 50% shareholder in the company, according to a statement from Snopes’ senior leadership. the Associated Press reported.

“Let us be clear: Plagiarism undermines our mission and values, full stop. It has no place in any context within this organization,” the statement said, as quoted by AP.

He was also accused by several former staffers of routinely encouraging the practice as a way to make Snopes appear faster than it was, Buzzfeed report said.

Mikkelson said that his behavior was due to a lack of formal journalism experience.

“I didn’t come from a journalism background. I wasn’t used to doing news aggregation. A number of times I crossed the line to where it was copyright infringement. I own that,” he told Buzzfeed.

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Created in 1994 under a different name by Mikkelson and his then-wife, Barbara Hamel, Snopes has earned two Webby Awards and served as one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners between December 2016 and February 2019, BuzzFeed News said. In recent years, the site has been the focus of a contentious ownership battle between Mikkelson and the company that bought Hamel’s shares.

Snopes said it was removing unattributed content while leaving up individual pages. An editor’s note will be used to outline the issues and link to original sources.

“We are in the process of archiving and retracting all of the offending stories, along with disabling any monetization features on those posts. We will attempt to contact each news outlet whose reporting we appropriated to issue an apology,” the statement said according to the Associated Press.