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Those who weren’t following us when we began back in the mid-1990s and have only more lately encountered our fact-checking efforts sometimes ask us why we addre

Those who weren’t following us when we began back in the mid-1990s and have only more lately encountered our fact-checking efforts sometimes ask us why we address humorous and satirical articles at Snopes.com. And the plain answer to that question is, “Because people ask us about them.” https://www.snopes.com/notes/why-we-include-humor-and-satire-in-snopes-com/ https://www.snopes.com/notes/why-we-include-humor-and-satire... Articles from sites like Babylon Bee -- hell, even from The Onion, in more than one case -- get stripped of context, quoted, slapped on meme GIFs, and traded around by folks who don't know (or sometimes don't care) about the source. Another quote from the linked article: If Clickhole (an offshoot of the Onion humor/satire site) publishes a new article, and within a day 1,200 different people have queried us to ask if that article is “true,” then clearly Clickhole isn’t well known to those 1,200 people. They, and others like them, are the audience we’re attempting to reach and inform that Clickhole is a humor site — not, obviously, the many people who follow Clickhole and therefore know that the site’s material is not intended to be factual. In our current highly-politicized environment, there's a subset -- and not an insignificant one -- of the population which is very ready to believe the worst about "The Other Side". The web site The Conversation surveyed over 800 people to ask about the most shared fake political stories on social media during a two-week period, and The Babylon Bee came up in their results: "Members of both parties failed to recognize that The Babylon Bee is satire, but Republicans were considerably more likely to do so. Of the 23 falsehoods that came from The Bee, eight were confidently believed by at least 15% of Republican respondents." https://theconversation.com/too-many-people-think-satirical-news-is-real-121666 https://theconversation.com/too-many-people-think-satirical-... I'm not suggesting this is a sign that Republicans are more gullible, per se -- I'm suggesting it's a sign that when people are fed satire that plays into their biases and that satire is played with an Onion-style perfectly straight face, more people than you think believe it. That means there's going to be way more than you think who say, "Hey, is that true?"... and go to snopes.com to find out. Even, yes, if the quote is from The Babylon Bee.

MockObject 7y ago
If they were honest about this, Snopes would publish a single entry covering all the prominent satire sites by name, and "warning" people that they are satire. As opposed to whacking moles.
- dkonofalski 7y ago
  >If they were honest about this Most traffic to Snopes probably comes from people searching for specific articles, quotes, and/or stories and a generic "these are all satire sites" page wouldn't pull up for those. If the goal is to combat specific instances of inaccurate information, even if the intent initially is satire, then what they're doing seems like a better solution that what you've suggested. I can't even understand how you'd jump from that to calling them dishonest because of it.
  - davvolun 7y ago
    And there's no reason why someone going to Snopes for an article at theonion.com or babylonbee.com can't be redirected or otherwise sent to an article covering the satire of the site. Nobody needs a separate Snopes article for every article produced by every satire site out there. Given the amount of disinformation put out there by so many sources versus the relatively limited resources of Snopes, wasting time on stuff no one needs or wants is a mistake. I'm wondering if a better model would be heavily moderated, crowdsourced fact-checking, like wikipedia.
    - dkonofalski 7y ago
      >And there's no reason why someone ... can't be redirected And how would you propose they do that? If there's no article that addresses the specific article, nothing would come up on a Google search for that which means there's no prompt to redirect them. They would still have to create some kind of content that gets indexed which would serve as the redirect.
      - davvolun 7y ago
        ^https?:\/\/(www)?\.theonion\.com.*$ -> http://snopes.com/the-onion http://snopes.com/the-onion As a start, need to get more complex from there (probably exclude theonion's About page, for example, but that covers 90% with almost 0 effort -- and standard analogy from there, if Snopes uses 90% of its effort to cover the first 90%, there's no way they can cover the last 10%; if they use 1% effort to cover 90%, there's still a lot of ability to cover the remaining 5% or 9% (because, let's be realistic, 100% is absolutely impossible).
bhk 7y ago
Hold on there. What was believed by significant percentage of people were "claims" from satirical articles. For example, "CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper said his belief that Trump colluded with Russia is unshakable; it will not change regardless of statements or evidence to the contrary." or "National Security Advisor John Bolton said that an attack on two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman is “an attack on all Americans.”" When taken out of context, it could appear entirely plausible (though unlikely) that Anderson Cooper or John Bolton really said that. People say weird things all the time. Only when the context of a satirical article is given would we expect someone to understand. An article like the CNN industrial washer story would clearly not be believed by a significant percentage of people.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  Clearly I'm in the minority of the public here, but both those claims are so outrageous that even if Reuters reported them I would be checking other sources as well to see if they got duped or hacked, or who knows what.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    It's happened more than once in the last couple of months that I came across actual news and had to do a double take and check to see if I'm accidentally on a satirical page. Just today: "Trump says Republicans should release their own transcripts in impeachment probe" You think that's satire? Here's the news article: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/468788-trump-says-republicans-should-release-their-own-versions-of https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/468788-trump-say... Not a line in there to suggest this is nonsense (which it is), here it is directly from the Ass's mouth: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1193896275093184512 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11938962750931845... Parody account? It has 'real' in it... You be the judge.
    - derision 7y ago
      Why do you think that's satirical? It's been proven that Adam Schiff lied in statements made in Congress and he's repeatedly leaked information or cherry picked parts of testimonies to support his narrative. Trump is suggesting the republicans release transcripts too, to better represent what's happening in the hearings.
JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
By the same token; on average, more intelligent and less sheltered people tend to be more gullible. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060523072353.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060523072353.h... Careful with that word "gullible" - I do not think it means what you think it means.

MockObject 7y ago

If they were honest about this, Snopes would publish a single entry covering all the prominent satire sites by name, and "warning" people that they are satire. As opposed to whacking moles.

dkonofalski 7y ago
>If they were honest about this Most traffic to Snopes probably comes from people searching for specific articles, quotes, and/or stories and a generic "these are all satire sites" page wouldn't pull up for those. If the goal is to combat specific instances of inaccurate information, even if the intent initially is satire, then what they're doing seems like a better solution that what you've suggested. I can't even understand how you'd jump from that to calling them dishonest because of it.
- davvolun 7y ago
  And there's no reason why someone going to Snopes for an article at theonion.com or babylonbee.com can't be redirected or otherwise sent to an article covering the satire of the site. Nobody needs a separate Snopes article for every article produced by every satire site out there. Given the amount of disinformation put out there by so many sources versus the relatively limited resources of Snopes, wasting time on stuff no one needs or wants is a mistake. I'm wondering if a better model would be heavily moderated, crowdsourced fact-checking, like wikipedia.
  - dkonofalski 7y ago
    >And there's no reason why someone ... can't be redirected And how would you propose they do that? If there's no article that addresses the specific article, nothing would come up on a Google search for that which means there's no prompt to redirect them. They would still have to create some kind of content that gets indexed which would serve as the redirect.
    - davvolun 7y ago
      ^https?:\/\/(www)?\.theonion\.com.*$ -> http://snopes.com/the-onion http://snopes.com/the-onion As a start, need to get more complex from there (probably exclude theonion's About page, for example, but that covers 90% with almost 0 effort -- and standard analogy from there, if Snopes uses 90% of its effort to cover the first 90%, there's no way they can cover the last 10%; if they use 1% effort to cover 90%, there's still a lot of ability to cover the remaining 5% or 9% (because, let's be realistic, 100% is absolutely impossible).

bhk 7y ago

Hold on there. What was believed by significant percentage of people were "claims" from satirical articles. For example, "CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper said his belief that Trump colluded with Russia is unshakable; it will not change regardless of statements or evidence to the contrary." or "National Security Advisor John Bolton said that an attack on two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman is “an attack on all Americans.”" When taken out of context, it could appear entirely plausible (though unlikely) that Anderson Cooper or John Bolton really said that. People say weird things all the time. Only when the context of a satirical article is given would we expect someone to understand. An article like the CNN industrial washer story would clearly not be believed by a significant percentage of people.

nkrisc 7y ago
Clearly I'm in the minority of the public here, but both those claims are so outrageous that even if Reuters reported them I would be checking other sources as well to see if they got duped or hacked, or who knows what.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  It's happened more than once in the last couple of months that I came across actual news and had to do a double take and check to see if I'm accidentally on a satirical page. Just today: "Trump says Republicans should release their own transcripts in impeachment probe" You think that's satire? Here's the news article: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/468788-trump-says-republicans-should-release-their-own-versions-of https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/468788-trump-say... Not a line in there to suggest this is nonsense (which it is), here it is directly from the Ass's mouth: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1193896275093184512 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11938962750931845... Parody account? It has 'real' in it... You be the judge.
  - derision 7y ago
    Why do you think that's satirical? It's been proven that Adam Schiff lied in statements made in Congress and he's repeatedly leaked information or cherry picked parts of testimonies to support his narrative. Trump is suggesting the republicans release transcripts too, to better represent what's happening in the hearings.

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

By the same token; on average, more intelligent and less sheltered people tend to be more gullible. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060523072353.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060523072353.h... Careful with that word "gullible" - I do not think it means what you think it means.