The curious case of Trimfeed News
Want to be a news source? All you need is a brand new website and a hijacked X account with a gold checkmark
Do you want to trim the noise and keep the news? At first glance, brand new news site Trimfeed and its emerging social media presence would appear to be right up your alley. On X (formerly Twitter), the nascent media organization has already purchased a gold verification checkmark for their official @trimfeed account. (Cost: either $200 or $1000 per month, depending on whether the account has the “Basic” or “Full” plan.) There are, however, a few problems — although all of the content on the @trimfeed X account and the associated tr.im website is from April 2024, the account itself dates back to June 2010, and appears to have been renamed and hijacked. Additionally, the Trimfeed website bears some marked similarities to a now-defunct dubious news site named BNN, which featured a large quantity of plagiarized content and stopped publishing at the beginning of April 2024 after being downranked in Google search results.
Although the “About” page on the Trimfeed website claims that Trimfeed has a “global team of seasoned journalists [that] brings you stories directly from the heart of the action”, the site at present does not appear to contain any original reporting. Instead, all of the currently available articles are simply summarized and reworded versions of stories published by other outlets, modified to fit Trimfeed’s template which includes a “Why this matters” and “Key Takeaways” section in each article. Some of the summaries contain incorrect information; for example, the Putin biopic mentioned in one of the articles in the above collage is premiering in September 2024, not 2023.
As mentioned earlier, the X account presently named @trimfeed, which has the permanent ID 158083419, has been renamed. In early 2020, researcher @ZellaQuixote and myself set about building a dataset of creation dates and a few other attributes of all Twitter accounts created prior to mid-May 2012. (This is when Twitter began switching from using sequential numbers as permanent IDs for accounts to the Snowflake ID system, which produces much larger ID numbers with embedded timestamps.) The account presently named @trimfeed is in this dataset and, as it turns out, was not named @trimfeed in 2020. Back then, its handle was @sugar_spice1044, and it had the display name “Marissa”, two followers, and no posts. This name change suggests that the account changed hands between 2020 and 2024, due to being purchased, hacked, or otherwise hijacked.
Trimfeed also has a YouTube account, which consists mostly of video copied from other sources with a “Trimfeed” watermark added. This YouTube account was created in January 2023, but (as with the Trimfeed X account) presently has no public content from prior to April 2024. Google searches reveal that this YouTube channel was previously named “BNN Breaking”, and was affiliated with a “news” site called BNN that published large amounts of plagiarized and reworded content. (BNN’s use of plagiarized content was covered on this blog back in January 2023.)
As of the time of this writing, the Trimfeed channel can still be located on Youtube using the former @bnnbreaking handle. The BNN Breaking channel posted extremely similar material to what the Trimfeed channel is presently posting: video copied from other sources with a “BNN” watermark added. The BNN-watermarked videos have all been deleted, but the channel still has over 100,000 subscribers from its previous incarnation.
The YouTube channel is not the only data point that connects Trimfeed to BNN. A quick comparison of the bylines on BNN’s and Trimfeed’s (plagiarized) articles shows that many of the same names appear on both sites, and several X accounts that regularly posted links to BNN articles prior to April 2024 now post links to Trimfeed content. Additionally, BNN seems to have largely stopped publishing in early April, both on its website and social media, with the Trimfeed website and related social media efforts activating shortly thereafter. It is possible that BNN was mothballed due to being downranked in Google search results in March 2024, and that the new Trimfeed site is an attempt to evade Google’s decision to classify Trimfeed’s predecessor as spam.