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Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name
- underseacables 5y agoSnopes lost credibility when they teamed up with Facebook
- nradov 5y agoSnopes lost credibility when they "fact checked" the Babylon Bee, a site which is clearly labeled as satire and never claimed to be real news. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/31/fact-checking_satire_--_is_snopes_serious_140893.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/31/fact-c...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jnwatson 5y agoLots of folks get confused about satire sites. It is a positive development if you can find another site on the internet that says "even if this is satire, this is why they are wrong".
- FireBeyond 5y agoPart of that was prompted by certain segments sharing Babylon Bee's posts unironically.
- nostromo 5y agoIt was likely a targeted campaign to cut off the Babylon Bee's traffic source. The Bee had been targeting the Snopes brand for a while with headlines like, "Snopes Issues Pre-Approval Of All Statements Made During Tonight's Democratic Debate." Facebook contracted with Snopes to fact check the news. Snopes knew that if they kept labeling obvious satire as false, The Bee would be more difficult to share on Facebook and potentially banned. This happened, but Facebook realized the error and no longer uses Snopes for fact-checking. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/03/02/facebook-admits-mistake-in-flagging-satire-about-cnn-spinning-the-news-with-a-washing-machine/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/03/...
- Borgz 5y agoI don't know how long they have been doing this for, but the two Snopes articles that this article links to use the rating "Labeled Satire", which seems accurate.
- nradov 5y agoSnopes altered those pages when they got called out for it.
- ezekiel68 5y agoOr perhaps they changed their minds once they realized the error? Just because something seems obvious to you doesn't mean it must seem obvious to anyone else. When friends of friends on my social media networks started posting links to their articles (without any context) I certainly got caught "refuting" more than a few of them in the comments until someone pointed this out to me.
- adamrezich 5y ago> Or perhaps they changed their minds once they realized the error? if you can't trust fact-checkers to check their facts, then what purpose do they serve? if some rando on twitter or whatever tries to "fact check" the Bee and doesn't see it as satire, then gets called out on it and modifies their statement, then who cares... but if the whole point of your business is to check facts, and is touted as such to the point where major social media sites and search engines directly cite your fact-checkings in a UI-integrated way, then, well...
- rufus_foreman 5y agoThey "realized the error" after the Babylon Bee put out a press release stating, "While we wish it wasn't necessary, we have retained a law firm to represent us in this matter". Organizations have more credibility when they realize their errors before the lawyers get involved.
- rvz 5y agoAnd any 'news' outlet that has cited Snopes was also probably spreading questionable information. But very unsurprising to see this from the already biased 'fact checkers'.
- commandlinefan 5y agoI think they lost credibility long before that, honestly...
- kirillzubovsky 5y agoNow if the chief fact checker could lie to the people he serves, just imagine who else could lie to the people …
- DudeInBasement 5y agoFact check: TRUE
- bbarnett 5y agoI just checked on snopes, this is false.
- danso 5y ago> Marchionni is reevaluating decisions Mikkelson made years earlier to not allow Snopes stories to be archived on the Wayback Machine and is empowered to make any changes necessary. Not the most immediate important thing, but hiding content from the Wayback Machine that is purported to be factual record is very problematic, to say the least
- ramraj07 5y agoI’m still struggling to understand why they’d want to block that. Edit: on re-reading I realize it’s so that they don’t get caught for this plagiarism since their modus operandi was plagiarize first rewrite slowly.
- jaywalk 5y agoSo they can silently change stuff without the ability for someone to go back and look at what it used to say.
- headmelted 5y agoHonestly I can almost imagine a way to arrive at this conclusion without it being shifty (although no idea what the case actually is here). If you're going to debunk an article about something like a lack of vaccine safety and need to retract a couple of sentences later, but the overall conclusion is the same, then the conspiracists will be right on you with a diff of the changes from the archive trying to piece together what it all means and who paid you off.
- js290 5y agoSnopes (& 'fact checking' in general) are scams... Pedophrasty, Bigoteering, and Other Modern Scams Clearing the discourse of abuses and abusers. The more you institutionalize rules of ethical behavior that should be voluntary, the more they will be used as a cover for unethical actions. https://medium.com/incerto/pedophrasty-bigoteering-and-other-modern-scams-c84bd70a29e8 https://medium.com/incerto/pedophrasty-bigoteering-and-other... The Facts are True, the News is Fake https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fake-5bf98104cea2 https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa...
- ericcholis 5y agoOh my, the "own the libs" die hards are going to love this
- imwillofficial 5y agoHow many mainstream news sources used snopes as a reliable source?
- NotChina 5y agoThe down voting really shows a dislove of the truth.
- m0llusk 5y agoSnopes provides references and reasoning. It can be wrong, but the references can be checked by anyone interested in a subject. If Snopes were relying instead on because I said so then this might make sense, but it isn't. Maybe previous experience with fakery may have contributed to inspiration for a fact checking service?
- nsizx 5y agoYou can just omit the references and reasoning that go against your narrative.
- velcii 5y agoIt might be time to rename IT as MIT, stands for Mis-information technology, which is what it is, as of now..
- qkqk 5y agoRemind me of their narrative again? They say that > "Trump did not explicitly tell people to 'storm' or 'breach' or 'break into' the [US] Capitol." and included the reasoning that > the president called on supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” march or walk to the Capitol ...but wait, their far-left narrative! Why didn't they omit those references and reasoning?! https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-tell-supporters-storm/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-tell-supporters-stor...
- busymom0 5y agoAlmost all these “fact checkers” exposed themselves on the lab leak theory which they had to redact after 1.5 years. Relying on any of them as a source of “truth” is asking for trouble. They are more of a narrative check.
- farp 5y agoParent comment is just a rehashing of a Fox News article. Seeing this more often on HN. https://www.foxnews.com/media/realclearpolitics-fact-checkers-practice-caution-lab-leak-about-face.amp https://www.foxnews.com/media/realclearpolitics-fact-checker...
- roody15 5y agoSnopes is truly disappointing and slanted. It’s early days it was a good reference tool… sadly in our divided times Snopes has clearly a political slant.
- CDRdude 5y agoCan you provide an example of an article that you feel has a clear political slant?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- h_anna_h 5y agoWhat about these? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-vaccine-passport/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-vaccine-passport/
- mjburgess 5y agoI agree that the first should be "YES" and the second "Mixed". The question is now whether you can find similar "right-friendly" stories that show a similar "hesitation" in the labelling. Probably you can.
- h_anna_h 5y agoYes, I remember a site listing the most evil people that ever existed and decided to place Marx at the top. It is not exactly the same thing (as it was not a fact-checking site) but it was similar enough. Although, is it really that the question? We have known that "both sides" have been bullshitting their way for ages. It's not as if this is a secret. The only reason that people care about Snopes having a political slant is because 1: it is popular and 2: it pretends that it is not (by being a fact checker). I am not aware of any similar popular and generally considered credible right wing site.
- nsizx 5y agoI have no love for these "fact checkers" which are nothing but mercenaries of the left but how does this revelation diminish the trust people should put on Snopes?
- jjcon 5y agoCan someone explain what the difference between this and pulling stuff off the AP machine is? I see almost identical news articles all the time across major news outlets. My partner used to work at a company and would write all their news, spotlights and press releases. They commonly would see paragraphs taken by major news outlets without attribution. She tells me that’s just how it was. I’m not in the industry but I thought copying from press releases and AP/Reuters sources was fairly standard. I’m sure there is a lot more to it here but I’m asking what the distinction is. Certainly I feel like plagiarism in the news isn’t quite the same as it is elsewhere.
- jaywalk 5y agoWhere are you seeing that he copied from press releases? The article says "material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times." That is very different from press releases.
- DFHippie 5y agoI take it these weren't press releases. They were articles published by other journalists under a byline. When you issue a press release, you have particular information you want other journalists to pick up and spread. Attribution doesn't matter to you. If you are a journalist, you want to be credited. This is your bread and butter. Whoever is plagiarizing you is stealing your work.
- DFHippie 5y agoPlagiarism is wrong. It also isn't the same thing as publishing false or misleading information about the topic of the article plagiarized. In other words, the articles plagiarized don't become false or misleading because of the plagiarism.
- h_anna_h 5y agoPreviously about Snopes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516283
- charbonneau 5y agoRelentlessly resourceful, am I right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Clewza313 5y agoFWIW, the Mikkelsons (couple originally behind the site) had a messy divorce and the lawsuits between their various entities continue to this day. The plagiarism here does seem pretty clear cut, but it's likely the funders of investigation have their own axe to grind. https://www.npr.org/2017/07/26/539576135/fact-checking-website-snopes-is-fighting-to-stay-alive https://www.npr.org/2017/07/26/539576135/fact-checking-websi...
- pessimizer 5y agoThanks for this, I had no idea why the site went downhill, and that dates it in my memory. Barbara Mikkelson was the only byline I actually remembered from Snopes, and was probably what I liked about it. I didn't know the other co-founder was an ex-usenet troll who started aggressively raising money right after she left, but it explains a lot.
- mzs 5y agoalso from the BF article (which also links to a wired story involving the divorce) which explains snopes direction: >Mikkelson described his vision for the site’s future “as a platform for traffic-generating junk that people would complain about if it were on ‘classic’ snopes,” including articles copied from "viral item of the day" sites.
- bobthechef 5y agoThe notion of "fact checker" is semantic slight of hand meant to give such people an undeserved veneer of special credibility beyond the weak credibility of journalists. It lulls people into a false sense of security. "He's not a journalist. He's a FACT CHECKER. Oooo, trustworthy!" It's an arrogant title that arrogates the supposed authority to check facts and offer pronouncements on them. All journalists, for example, are supposed to verify their claims (they don't, but that's a dereliction of duty). But here comes the "fact checker". "Stand aside, you unwashed masses. I have special access to the truth that you don't have! I have the means of verifying claims that go beyond the paltry powers of the journalist. I am...the FACT CHECKER MAN!" The point is that the fact checker does not transcend the journalist. Investigative reporters are "fact checkers" but without the Ministry-of-Truth title of "fact checker" that's supposed to shut down conversation and ram through the "fact checker's" preferred narrative and accounting of the "facts".
- argomo 5y agoFact checkers reconcile memes/news media against primary sources/other news media while adding context, references, and journalistic integrity. Yes, they're human and inevitably bring their own biases, but do you really think we shouldn't have some folks doing that job?
- pessimizer 5y ago> Fact checkers reconcile memes/news media against primary sources/other news media Yes, that's what they do. They should do this for every article in your publication. > while adding context, references, and journalistic integrity. No, this is editorial.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoI think you're trying to draw too fine a line. Fact-checking is definitionally part of the editorial process. In publications that don't have separate fact-checking departments, it would literally be part of the editor's job description.
- 5y ago
- moolcool 5y agoThis article is ironic coming from Buzzfeed
- rootusrootus 5y agobuzzfeednews is a different thing entirely than buzzfeed
- betwixthewires 5y agoDiet Coke has literally nothing at all to do with Coca Cola whatsoever.
- jfengel 5y agoIt's from BuzzFeed News, which has become a fairly reputable news organization. It even has a Pulitzer prize. It has an avowed left-wing bias, but it's not about listicles. They're doing serious reporting. It's the same company as BuzzFeed, and the name certainly isn't doing it any favors. But this story isn't BuzzFeed-style junk. It's actually relevant, and most likely factual. Seems bizarre, but it's true.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoOutsourcing reality checks to private organizations is a serious problem with 21st century America. The Southern Poverty Law Center is another similar org that is treated as authoritative yet has zero safeguards or unbiased processes.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoPayPal recently partnered with the ADL to ban accounts and prevent the wrong people from making transactions. Should be beyond concerning that not only they did that, but celebrated themselves for it. The ADL has ever widening definition of “problematic“ that extends to political topics far outside of their mission statement. I would really have to think about who is less biased, the SPLC or the ADL.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoPayPal is pretty embedded in the institutional power matrix, so it’s not really that surprising. They want to be a bank, if they aren’t already one.
- shadilay 5y agoThey want to be as much like a bank as possible but without any of the regulation.
- commandlinefan 5y agoTo me the biggest promise of cryptocurrency is the hope of an "uncensorable" form of commerce.
- rootusrootus 5y agoWhat is your solution? Every single source of news, every last one, will have perhaps 1/3 or more of the population calling it fake news.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
- undecisive 5y agoGiven how much mudslinging has gone on with Snopes over the years, and how little I know about Buzzfeed News' journalistic integrity, I really wish there was a factchecking page about this on an established factchecking website...
- lolc 5y agoWhat do you make of the statement published on snopes.com itself? https://www.snopes.com/2021/08/13/snopes-writers-condemn-plagiarism/ https://www.snopes.com/2021/08/13/snopes-writers-condemn-pla...
- undecisive 5y agoAh, nice. Couldn't see that. Still can't find it linked to on their site, so appreciate the link!
- vfclists 5y agoHN is becoming less and less a place where issues are rarely discussed. The most irrelevant comments always rise to the top and more and more people join in and waffle about nothing. The interesting point in the article is this one: "Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company." How can the whatever whatever suspend her boss from editorial duties pending a comprehensive internal investigation? Did she clear that with her boss first? What Covid has proved is that the whole media has become a pack of shills, which is false because they have always been pack of shills, only they were more subtle about it?
- latexr 5y ago> How can the whatever whatever suspend her boss from editorial duties pending a comprehensive internal investigation? Did she clear that with her boss first? From David Mikkelson’s statement (scroll to the bottom): > I have given full authority to our managing editor, Doreen Marchionni, to take any measures needed to address these issues.
- vfclists 5y agoDid she ask the boss for the boss to give her the authority, or did the boss approach her voluntarily and give the authority. So why didn't the boss apply his own authority to himself and announce it to the press? The whole thing is face. Why didn't the boss simply resign himself from the role?
- paulpauper 5y agoIt's amazing how sleuths are able to uncover even subtle plagiarism from many years ago. If you take shortcuts , you will be found out eventually if someone is determined enough to find out. Eventually a few seemingly unrelated piece are arranged and shortly thereafter the full picture emerges.
- balozi 5y agoSnopes will probably rate the Buzzfeed claims as "False but Factual"
- pessimizer 5y agoLiterally true but misleading, 4/5 Pinocchios.
- pessimizer 5y agoI think the main take-away from this is that these "factcheckers" are just copying from a single line. In the desperate attempt to scoop up more cash, Snopes did the rewriting after posting rather than before, but as long as what you posted was identical to the NYT/WaPo line, it wouldn't be subject to any sort of examination or critique. Anyway, aren't Snopes pages just links that Democrats post without reading as a comment under a reactionary or socialist relative's post on Facebook? Nobody is reading them, so the only thing that matters is the headline and the graphic.
- bifrost 5y agoI initially thought Snopes was a great idea, and in the early days it seemed quite handy. Now its only really minorly credible. My personal experience was finding an article that talked about something I was directly involved in, and it was clearly wrong. I basically lost most trust in its ratings however it does seem to basically cover the issue in text. My main quibbles are with when the article covers something substantially and then says the rating only depends on less than 10% of the article.
- teddyh 5y ago> My personal experience was finding an article that talked about something I was directly involved in, and it was clearly wrong. Snopes can only go by what other sources have written, since they weren’t there. If you have direct personal experience, it’s certainly likely that your view will differ from the one reported by Snopes, for two reasons: Firstly, your view is by definition limited and personal, and is likely skewed one way or the other. But secondly, all journalists who write about something have similar incentives (i.e. to write an interesting ‘story’), and will therefore likely all choose a similar narrative based on a similar starting point. I should note that Wikipedia has the exact same problem, since Wikipedia must limit itself to secondary sources.
- TeeMassive 5y ago> Snopes can only go by what other sources have written Or they could do basic journalism: directly contact sources or seek access to first hand material and do cross-refence. It used to be the standard back in the days to have at least three independent sources before publishing a story.
- teddyh 5y agoIf they did that, they would have no references to back up their claims. This is why Wikipedia does what it does; they need to be able to reference every claim.
- meragrin_ 5y ago
- pembrook 5y agoAll modern media companies today have been built by using these kinds of shady "growth hacks." Doesn't anybody see the irony of Buzzfeed calling out a fellow media company for using such tactics? Buzzfeed's entire growth strategy for years was copy-pasting content from trending reddit threads and turning them into "listicles" with clickbait headlines, then feeding them into Facebook. Was that not also plagiarism?
- dheera 5y agoExactly, I'm not actually surprised, don't most news media just copy articles from each other? Every time I post a guest blog to a news site it appears on 10 other news sites within a day.
- aalam 5y agoThere's a term for that in journalism: "matching" a story. This traditionally involves legwork, such as contacting the same sources quoted in the first article to verify that facts are true. This legwork is usually done by traditionally respected publications (i.e. not just copying and pasting). Other outlets and blogs with different goals do blatantly copy and paste, which produces articles less valuable than those traditionally matched. Matching—versus copying and pasting—is important because it avoids the spread of false reports. From "The Elements of Journalism" by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel: "Originality is a bulwark of better journalism, deeper understanding, and more accurate reporting. […] In the era before curation and aggregation, the tradition of “matching” stories was rooted in the same idea. Rather than publishing another news outlet’s scoop, journalists tended to require one of their reporters to call a source to confirm it first. This tradition of matching was a way for news organizations to avoid having to credit their rivals, which in this earlier era was considered an embarrassing admission of being scooped. Yet the tradition of matching had another more important and salutary effect. Stories that couldn’t be independently confirmed would not be repeated." A norm in the journalism industry is to credit the first publication who reported an investigative scoop, naming the outlet (e.g. this New York Times article [0] cites information reported by less-read Punchbowl News). [0] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/21/us/joe-biden https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/21/us/joe-biden
- mancerayder 5y agoIt really highlights questions we should be asking like, if we accept the status of "fact checker" for some media or other organization, how do we ensure we fact check these fallible, human organizations? We're not perfect, and our ideas around institutional legitimacy ("this one is a fact-checker, this one is fake news") need to be constantly challenged.
- ezekiel68 5y agoA lot of the responses here seem to be attempting to sow Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) on the fact-checking articles themselves (which were not in any way implicated by the revelations of this article). As if there is some kind of "essence" that permeates an orgainization which either wholly condemns it or wholly justifies it. I reject this assessment. Every article stands or falls on its own.
- least 5y agoSort of. In a vacuum it can certainly function that way, but people in reality don't necessarily have the time to distill pure water from poisoned wells, especially when there's a well that is reputably pure right next to it. That being said, I think that buzzfeed news has actually earned a reputation of producing some good journalism despite it being an offshoot of Buzzfeed. Simply the irony is not lost on these people.
- betwixthewires 5y agoWhen we call some information source "reputable" we are saying that we are relying on their reputation of having integrity so as to not have to dig into every detail of everything ourselves. Every article linked on godlike productions stands on it's own as well by this logic. If we go by this logic there is no reputable or disreputable organization, there are only articles. Of course that defeats the whole purpose of branding your organization, so even in this case there is no reason to trust Snopes or any other fact checker, there's no reason for fact checking because you have to fact check the fact checks yourself as every article stands on it's own. But of course that's not how it works. We rely on brands like Snopes because we trust them, because we view them as having a reputation of integrity. So it isn't fud to point out that there are shameless bald faced liars without an ounce of integrity at all running the organization.
- mherdeg 5y agoYeah I don't trust Mikkelson's writing very much because of this Snopes article: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/ (mentioned in the article). It's not in the special section of their site marking it as satire or anything but it cites a nonexistent source ("Lisa Birgit Holst", anagram for "this is a big troll"). The weird thing is that … as far as I could tell the real origin of the "people eat eight spiders a year" thing was a 1992 campus humor column ( some notes at https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/80j3px/til_a_writer_by_the_name_of_lisa_holst_created_an/duwnw21/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/80j3px/til_a... ). That would have been a perfectly fine story to write and I'm not sure why he just made something up instead, except as some kind of quiet prank.
- technothrasher 5y agoI remember being freaked out as a kid in the 1970's at the "you eat spiders while you sleep" urban legend, so it predates that 1992 humor column by at least 15 years or so.
- TimPC 5y agoThe biggest problem with Snopes is their unwillingness to rate something as opinion rather than fact. As a result they assign truth ratings to things that are mostly opinion pieces and those truth ratings are often accusing the opinion piece of making something up. The opinions in said pieces may or may not be well supported by facts but they are still opinions and calling one false is misleading at best and dangerous at worse. Especially when you have become a source for social media censorship.
- eagsalazar2 5y agoCan you provide a link to an article you feel is especially illustrative of this problem?
- TimPC 5y agoI’d rather focus on the broader claim that the right set of answers for fact checking is {True, False, Opinion} the get bogged down in the specifics of the exactly correct boundaries between these categories, which has some subjectivity and is likely to become the main topic of discussion if any example is provided.
- TimPC 5y agoI also think the right thing to do is pull out individual claims in articles and rate the claims rather than trying to rate the article as a whole. There are a few edge cases where entirely true facts are put together in misleading ways that might get assigned higher than ideal truth ratings in this construction but I think it does far better than trying to rate articles as a whole which confuses the matter entirely and introduces a lot more subjectivity.
- busymom0 5y agoI gave couple examples here. It's a long comment so I don't want to repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173312
- nowWut88 5y agoSo now what? The information is out there. Do we hold journalism accountable? Do we change social rules? Do we trust Snopes? What’s the value of this information other than gossip? Does it improve our scientific understanding of anything? Or just reiterate how useless 24/7 information cycles are? I’m being sincere; constant scandal over… nothing burgers. Meanwhile, the environment is burning up in part due to the systems we cobble together to distribute nonsense. I struggle with the point of this culture. This is the equivalent of a paranoid neighbor peeking through the blinds and grunting nonsense in their house about their neighbors. Such high standards, HN
- betwixthewires 5y agoI'd ask for a fact check on that, but I don't need one because buzzfeed is a reputable, trustworthy publication. Kidding aside, this was widely known as far back as 2016 and discussed heavily online, but called a conspiracy theory and criticized by all the reputable rags that rely on fact checking to lie to you and convince you that you can't trust your own judgment. The fact that this is being reported now probably means someone became no longer useful, every last one of these fact checkers and reputable news publications are doing things like this daily and gaslighting their readers.
- lozaning 5y agoBuzzfeed News != Buzzfeed. One has a pulitzer and the other tells you what Hogwarts house you're in.
- betwixthewires 5y agoWalter Duranty has a Pulitzer as well, the New York Times that he worked for when he wrote what he is known for writing has many. A brand is a brand and an organization is an organization. If they're truly that separate they wouldn't rely on the same brand. And besides, Buzzfeed is more reputable than Buzzfeed News, because the former is obvious nonsense and the latter pretends to be serious and honest.
- pessimizer 5y ago> Many prominent news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed News, have acknowledged plagiarism in their own pages and publicly corrected the record, as Snopes is doing now. How does a sentence like this end up in a supposedly serious article? Bad editing? Does Buzzfeed own a piece of Snopes?
- kstrauser 5y agoI really want to like Snopes, but I'm not convinced that they weigh evidence correctly. For example, they debunked the myth that Marilyn Monroe had 6 toes. First, I don't believe that she did. Or even care, for that matter. But at the time, one of their "facts" was that if she'd had a toe removed, she'd basically have to learn to walk all over again because it would throw her balance completely off. (Note: the article no longer includes this fact. It did at one time, though.) However, my wife's a podiatrist. Part of her job is amputating parts of feet when they're damaged or infected beyond repair. I asked her what it's like for an otherwise healthy adult to recover from a pinky toe amputation, and she said it's basically a matter of waiting for the wound site to heal and then they continue with life as normal. Contrary to popular belief, even a big toe amputation isn't that disruptive. A vestigial 6th toe hanging off to the side? You'd never notice it was gone. I emailed Snopes and said hey, while I agree with your conclusion, this particular supporting fact is invalid according to an expert in the field. They replied basically that I was an idiot for believing she had 6 toes, and they left the article as-is. That's not at all what I thought, and I actually agreed with their conclusion. I just didn't like that they were using incorrect facts to support it, and especially didn't like that they reacted poorly to a well-meant correction. Since then, I've been skeptical of Snopes. Although I think they're probably right most of the time, that left a bad taste in my mouth. Are other people sending them corrections about their own fields of expertise and having them rejected? I have no way of knowing.
- colpabar 5y agoHad you checked the article after this encounter? I guess they eventually realized you were right and made the change, but I wonder when that happened. Other comments here discuss how it's odd that they don't allow their site to be archived, and it's interesting to see a real example that illustrates why they may not want that.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoSilent edits seem like a huge red flag that your platform isn't trustworthy.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y agoBack in the mid-1990s I had created a webpage about an exclusive tourist destination, which included several digitized photos I had taken. Snopes stole those photos for their page and never credited me, even after I emailed asking them to.
- S_A_P 5y agoFact checking all the facts is an extremely broad scope. A small mom and pop company is hardly able to support such a mission unless they happen to be multidisciplinary experts/geniuses. I always seemed a bit doubtful about some of the conclusions drawn from that site.
- ErikVandeWater 5y agoThe only facts they could debunk would be the truly absurd (e.g. that this smoothie will extend your life by a decade!) Or instances where insufficient evidence is used to draw an absolute conclusion. I've seen them actually commit the latter where they fact check a politician's prediction based on an expert projection as if the expert is infallible.
- cupcake-unicorn 5y agoWas really sickened by some of the political stuff I saw on Snopes, like this one, which reads almost like it's from the Onion: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-no-empathy/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-no-empathy/
- rootsudo 5y agoI enjoy the irony of one internet news site, criticizing, accurately, one of the original "internet" news sites. While both had a shaky past, how buzzfeed went from "take this quiz to discover which disney princess are you" to taking down an snopes expose is fantastic.
- dane-pgp 5y agoIt's well known that Snopes has a dark side. The couple that run it also run a network of spam servers that start many of those forwarded stories in the first place, ensuring they'll always have business. (I didn't come up with that claim, but the source of it isn't very popular on this site, so I'll just give its number instead of a URL: 250).
- kragen 5y agoI find it really grating to see David Mikkelson described as the "cofounder of Snopes", because snopes is Barbara Hamel (then Barbara Mikkelson), his ex-wife, the well-known poster to alt.folklore.urban. David Mikkelson is definitely not a founder of Barbara Hamel, just her ex-husband. The website is named after her because it was her site. But at this point she has been unrelated to the site for several years, similar to the case of Ernesto and Julio Gallo.
- RickJWagner 5y agoSnopes is a great resource if you want truthful articles with an extreme political bias. I don't believe they'll ever tell an outright lie, but they'll go to extreme lengths to say only negative things about one side of the political spectrum and only positive things about the other side. It's an incredible way to control the narrative. The only problem I find with Snopes is that it plays strongly to people's biases. They'll come to think only from one side of the scale, universally to their detriment.
- at_a_remove 5y agoIt seems my basic fear of anyone slapping on a white hat and saying that they are one of the good guys is once again vindicated.
- brightball 5y agoIf you’ve ever gone deep on a controversial topic trying to trace the references that Snopes uses, this won’t surprise you at all. https://babylonbee.com/news/concerning-survey-finds-too-many-people-think-snopes-is-a-real-fact-checking-website https://babylonbee.com/news/concerning-survey-finds-too-many...
- cruizen 5y agoBut, it was debunked by... (Yes?) ... Oh my god. https://xkcd.com/250/ https://xkcd.com/250/