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Snopes, SPLC, and their ilk and become less credible institutions, and more an arm of the culture wars every day.
by GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
Snopes, SPLC, and their ilk and become less credible institutions, and more an arm of the culture wars every day.
- mikeash 9y agoPointing out that satire is, in fact, not a correct recounting of events makes them less credible?
- norikki 9y ago>what you say Facebook did: "Pointing out satire" >what facebook actualy said: "Repeat offenses will see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertise removed" So facebook censors conservatives for the 10,000th time this year, and you poo poo it because its just "pointing out satire". It's pretty undeniable at this point that there is a culture war going on, and you have picked a side.
- jdminhbg 9y agoYes? Treating obvious satire as worthy of correction makes you look clueless. The linked Snopes fact-check says that some readers took the idea that CNN literally puts "news" in an industrial washing machine, which I find... difficult to believe.
- marshray 9y agoIf there's one thing we've learned in the last two years it's that what's obviously silly to anyone with broad sources of information and critical thinking skills may be considered plausible by a shocking number of people. I would prefer that Snopes error on the side of stating the obvious.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoI would prefer that people stop taking the word of Snopes about anything. They have zero qualifications, credentials, or expertise to pass judgment on any of the subjects they opine upon. It's a real mystery how they managed to get so many people to consider them infallible. "Snopes said (whatever)" has exactly as much credibility as "Some random guy said (whatever)", i.e., none whatsoever. Edit: in response to some of the comments below, there's a lengthy discussion of some of the problems with Snopes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/#2024e828227f https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...
- mikeash 9y agoThey always explain their sources and reasoning, so you can easily check for yourself.
- jdminhbg 9y agoThey didn't exactly source their claim that "some readers took the story seriously."
- eridius 9y agoI think the source for that is the fact that some readers reported the story to Facebook. The whole reason Snopes even fact-checked it is because they were asked to.
- jdminhbg 9y agoI think that's backwards. Facebook is using Snopes as a source for detecting fake news, so once this showed up on Snopes as "False," FB flagged it as fake.
- eridius 9y agoFrom the article: > What more likely happened is that some trigger-happy activists who don't appreciate Christian and conservative satire reported The Babylon Bee to Facebook, setting off an investigation by Snopes. Obviously not a definitive answer as to what happened, but it seems plausible. Surely Snopes doesn't proactively fact-check every single article posted to Facebook, they wouldn't have the manpower to do that. It makes sense that they'd fact-check only after people report the story to Facebook.
- jdminhbg 9y agoAha, I missed that, thanks. So it looks like it's a two-way street for reporting/flagging. Could've been either one, but I think your explanation makes more sense.
- mikeash 9y agoI’m surprised at this notion that nobody would have actually believed the story. Have you met people? A lot of them are really dumb.
- jdminhbg 9y agoThis isn't "of course this is implausible," this is "there is not any actual physical way to conceive of this happening." This is kind of why "fact-checking" this hurts Snopes' credibility. The only reason to fact-check this article is to take a snide shot at putative stupid people who think it's possible somehow to literally wash news in a washing machine.
- mikeash 9y agoPeople believe all sorts of inconceivable things.
- s73v3r_ 9y agoGiven how many people mistake The Onion for being real, that service is needed.
- makomk 9y agoI've seen worse. PolitiFact managed to fact check an article from military satire site DuffelBlog and just didn't seem to grasp that it was satire, at all. They wrote, in excruciating detail, about all the increasingly silly and implausible claims and at no point did it occur to them that maybe they should take them as a hint that the whole thing was a joke, an incredibly unsubtle humorous reference to actual events: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/nov/16/duffel-blog/no-bowe-bergdahl-didnt-wander-during-court/ http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/nov/16/...
- mikeash 9y agoDid you read to the end? They clearly know it’s satire and have a thorough discussion of that.
- makomk 9y agoYes, I did read to the end, and no they don't. They treated it as though it's one of the many actual fake news sites that builds its business model around tricking people but hides away a disclaimer somewhere claiming to be a satire site in order to dodge complaints, describing it as though that disclaimer was the only thing tipping readers off that the article wasn't true. None of the DuffelBlog articles are exactly subtle, including that one.
- mikeash 9y agoThey’re just stating the facts. Your claim that it never occurred to them that it’s satire is clearly wrong.
- ng12 9y agoJust because it's technically correct doesn't mean it's not a stupid/dangerous thing to do. For further reading, my favorite tweet of the election: https://twitter.com/nbcnews/status/785299709342654465?lang=en https://twitter.com/nbcnews/status/785299709342654465?lang=e...
- mikeash 9y agoI don’t see why this is so bad. If it was anybody else, it would be obvious that it was a metaphor, but this is the same guy who said Obama literally founded ISIS.
- mizzack 9y agoBecause they took the truth of statement, i.e. HRC deleted emails from her private email server, and labeled it a falsehood using meaningless semantics as justfication. Acid washed vs. bleachbit has nothing to do with the thesis of the statement. How is that not bad?
- mikeash 9y agoA key part of the statement was that acid washing is very expensive and that proves bad intent or something like that. It was not a casual metaphor. https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-facts/ https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-fact...
- mizzack 9y agoStill ignoring the underlying point that the emails were irrecoverably destroyed and summarizing with 'Claims Hillary Clinton "had her emails — 33,000 emails — acid washed ... a very expensive process' and a reductive "FALSE" rubber stamp. The vast majority of people won't read past the summary (or NBC's tweet). They will see the FALSE rating, and take from that that no emails were destroyed, which the wrong conclusion.
- 9y ago
- cryptonector 9y agoYes. They took satire seriously. That's very funny, but they clearly missed some clues.
- mikeash 9y ago“Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof....” They didn’t take it seriously. They fact-checked it on the basis that someone else might take it seriously.
- cryptonector 9y agoYou can't be serious. "CNN uses washer machine to spin ..." sounds utterly ridiculous. It is ridiculous. It can only be satire. Who would ever say such a thing and mean it? Answer: only mentally disabled people. And who would take them seriously? Unless you think most people are so disabled, there's no point "debunking" obvious satire, and if so many people were so disabled, then there'd be no point debunking anything anyways.
- mikeash 9y agoIt’s about as ridiculous as “Obama founded ISIS” and yet our President apparently believed that one.
- s73v3r_ 9y agoOnly among those who are invested in them being discredited. To everyone else, their work is as accurate and credible as it always has been.
- gnu8 9y agoThe SPLC? Seriously? Bigotry isn’t a legitimate point of view. You don’t have a right to have that opinion.
- nbdev 9y agoBlindly supporting something and crying "Bigot!" if anyone questions it is legitimate? Seriously, no.
- s73v3r_ 9y agoThis idea that people are blindly just calling "Bigot", as if it isn't based on the actions and words of the people in question, is pretty old.
- remarkEon 9y agoIronically, the base definition of “Bigot” is simply intolerance of those who hold different opinions. This describes the social justice Left quite a bit more than it does the Right currently. So, yes, people are indeed blindly calling folks “Bigot” without thinking through what doing so implies about their own tolerance toward others.
- s73v3r_ 9y agoWhy should one have tolerance for the intolerant? Why should a gay person have tolerance for someone saying that they basically don't deserve the same rights as other people?
- remarkEon 9y agoBecause otherwise you have to sit here and enumerate which things exactly are intolerable. Do you really think you or anyone possesses the moral authority or wisdom to do that? If a Catholic considers it wrong and immoral to condone Gay Marriage why do you get to claim authority over their conventions?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- maldusiecle 9y agoThis is pretty dodgy. Snopes also fact-checks articles by The Onion, which has a definite liberal lean. (Here's the tag: https://www.snopes.com/tag/the-onion/ https://www.snopes.com/tag/the-onion/) If you're going to tar them as an "arm of the culture wars" you're going to have to do a little better than this.
- smsm42 9y agoWait, it sounds like you think mentioned that Snopes routinely "fact-checks" satire, as opposed to it being a random one-off miscommunication, is somehow counts towards Snopes being more respectable and not them just forgetting what "fact checking" used to mean one day?
- maldusiecle 9y agoI didn't say Snopes was more or less respectable; my point was that they aren't engaging in "culture war" by doing what this article says that they're doing. I'm not crazy about them fact-checking satire, but it's incredibly obvious why they have to--because people treat them as a one-stop-shop for finding out whether an article is real or not. For The Onion that might be easy to answer, but there are also a lot of terrible, unfunny wannabe satirical sites, and people do get confused.
- smsm42 9y ago> my point was that they aren't engaging in "culture war" by doing what this article says that they're doing. True, that ("fact-checking" satire) is not an act of culture war. It is a behavior that makes them very questionable candidate as an arbiter of truth, which Facebook seems to have anointed them to be. > but it's incredibly obvious why they have to- No it isn't. On the contrary, them confusing "checking" satire and checking real facts blurs the lines between fictional expression - which can't be rated as true or false as it is not a factual statement - and factual claims which can be evaluated as true or false. > people treat them as a one-stop-shop for finding out whether an article is real or not That's a bad thing, both from the point of view of robustness - that means that people surrender their agency and critical thinking to some random site on the internet - and from the point of view of choice of that single point of failure - by choosing the site that can't even go as far as distinguishing between factual statement and fictional expression and routinely confuses the two. If they just said "The Onion is a satire site, the Bablon Bee is a satire site, that's it, move on" - it'd be fine. But the way they do it - to actually evaluate it as a factual statement and assign rating "false" to it - is mixing two concepts, and it's a bad thing. "Fact checkers" regularly commit the same thing by "fact checking" opinions they oppose as "false" - and that is very much a part of the culture war, an attempt to present one opinion as "objective fact" and the opposing one as "objective falsity". Snopes did not do it in this particular case, true - but they did it in other cases, as well as other "fact checker" outlets. That predictably hurt the reputation of the whole business.
- pjc50 9y agoSounds like your own personal Overton window is drifting further off into the distance of the culture wars instead.