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Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning. It is inherently biased. The heavy political leanings of those in direct control of the organizations' ve

Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning. It is inherently biased. The heavy political leanings of those in direct control of the organizations' verdicts are brought up time and time again, and even memes are being made about sites like Snopes. My favorite meme goes something like: Did x member of y political organization get arrested for hitting some in the head with a baseball bat? FALSE. [big block of text] X member of y political organization was arrested for hitting someone in the head with a cricket bat. [big block of text]

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Their hit rate on truth is probably 95/100 though as opposed to far left media which has gone flat out bonkers. I'm glad services are there.
yaomtc 5y ago
Whenever I see a Snopes article where the claim is similar to the facts, but some parts are off, they use "Mixed", not "False".
zimpenfish 5y ago
> baseball bat? [...] cricket bat. In my experience, Snopes would have rated that "Mostly true" or "Mixture". Do you have examples where they've given a clearly misleading rating?
- hereforphone 5y ago
  Are you questioning the veracity of memes sir?
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    No, just checking facts.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  For example, this whole article just should not exist: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/15/facebook-posts/keystone-xl-suspension-probably-wont-boost-oil-pri/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/15/facebook-p... There is a whole genre of "fact-check" articles of the form: "X says that Y will cause Z to happen. Here's why experts say that's wrong." i.e. "fact-checking" a prediction about something that will happen in the future. Unless you're clairvoyant, that isn't a fact-check because the facts literally haven't happened yet! So any rating at all is misleading. I mean yeah, maybe you could fact-check something that can be predicted with high accuracy, like whether a solar eclipse will happen. But they do it for economic and social and political issues. They just shouldn't, at all. "Fact-checking" is just clever marketing label for meta-journalism, i.e. journalism-about-journalism. It isn't some category that has magically different standards or incentives than ordinary journalism. It perplexes me that smart, skeptical people think that Snopes or Politifact are somehow free from the exact same bias-producing incentives and motivations of every other news outlet.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    When you say that "this whole article just should not exist", are you stating that predictions should never be investigated, validated, measured against the statements of experts? Or are you just quibbling that it shouldn't count as "fact checking"? The former seems silly and the latter gets a shrug from me (who cares if there's a better phrase than "fact checking").
    - _dain_ 5y ago
      Of course the predictions should be investigated and validated, but only after the events have come to pass. If you're going to write something beforehand (e.g. contrasting the predictions of various experts), don't call it a fact-check, because it's not about facts, it's about opinions. Informed, educated opinions yes, but still fundamentally opinions.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        That's fairly absurd on its face. There are many important predictions to be made about medium term outcomes (say, in the 5-25 year range). If someone says "We will never develop grid-level energy storage because elves cannot fly, therefore renewable energy is hopeless", we don't have to wait one second to investigate and (in)validate this claim. If someone says "Sea level will drop by 3m within 15 years because today's cows are farting less", we do no thave to wait 15 years to investigate and (in)validate this. If someone says "Astronomical body N28291k will hit the earth at 13:45 on Dec 2nd 2037", we do not need to wait until 2037 to investigate and validate the claim. If someone says "The cost of coal will decrease by 20% over the next 10 years", when all known reserves of coal are more difficult to access than historical ones and when demand for coal appears to be dropping, we do not need to wait 10 years to investigate and (in)validate this.
- syshum 5y ago
  I am not sure about Snopes, but Politifact sure has several like the OP's example
junon 5y ago
This is not at all my experience with snopes. They've been pretty transparent from what I've seen.
- hereforphone 5y ago
  The issue in my opinion is that there are various, almost-equally "true" perspectives that can be reenforced with facts and presented. That there is no single objective truth to all matters means that biases (political, religious, etc.) act as a lens and the "truth" presented on fact-checking sites (and elsewhere) is shaped by this lens. This is why you can have news organizations with different political slants painting a story two entirely different ways, without directly lying.
  - junon 5y ago
    I disagree. There are definitely some things that are completely and entirely false, not left up to speculation. My point was more that Snopes tends to indicate when something isn't clear-cut.
    - evv555 5y ago
      Out of curiosity I googled the current state of articles regarding "Wuhan Lab Leak" theory and potential NIH connection to gain of function research. Both issues that aren't clear-cut but have compelling evidence. None of these articles show the nuance you are claiming they would show.
- nradov 5y ago
  Except for the time that Snopes fact checked this article as "disputed": "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication". (The article was very clearly labeled as satire.) https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008 https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008
  - junon 5y ago
    1 is a very small sample set.
dymk 5y ago
Link an example please
- Supermancho 5y ago
  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-freed-child-rapist-laughed-about-it/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-freed-chil... She chuckled, but she didn't laugh. False? https://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/clintons-1975-rape-case/ https://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/clintons-1975-rape-case/ Well she did laugh. True? Binary opposites for this detail, depending on which you are citing.
  - tzs 5y ago
    They both say the same thing. She laughed at some points during the interview, but not about the outcome of the case. A chuckle is a quiet or inward laugh. All chuckles are laughs but not all laughs are chuckles.
    - Supermancho 5y ago
      > They both say the same thing. They say some of the same things. The conclusions are different, despite the material to the fact. This is an example, as requested.
  - kristjansson 5y ago
    Both links place the 'laughed' piece of the claim in the 'true' column of the analysis, with more accurate characterizations and contextualization of 'about it'
jevoten 5y ago
I think the more salient factor is which facts they choose to check. Better to leave some stories un-checked, so they can be dismissed as only reported by right-wing sources. In one instance, PolitiFact requested NewsBusters to prove a chart on illegal immigration they posted was true, with the implied threat of labeling it false. When NewsBusters complied within the 14 hour window given, proving their claims true, PolitiFact did.. nothing. No post telling NewsBuster's claim was proven true. https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2021/04/21/politifact-asks-us-back-our-chart-when-we-did-nothing-happened https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2021/04/21/p...
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Sure, but give examples and you often start to find that the topics are so far afield from reality that they don't merit the cost of a fact-check. Snopes has fact-checked claims that Donald Trump said Earth is flat (false) but not whether Earth is flat, and they won't fact-check that any time soon.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    They won't fact-check that if Donald Trump claimed it?
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      No, they won't fact-check "Earth is flat" because it would be a waste of resources; the evidence Earth is a globe is overwhelming.
- deleted 5y ago
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- JPKab 5y ago
  You're being downvoted for no reason I can tell, other than the fact that NewsBuster is a source popular with right-wing audiences. There are people on HN who basically will downvote anything they perceive as being supportive of their political enemies, with no regard to the content of the message. Message to those downvoting this: If your position on free speech changes depending on who is doing the moderating, you don't have a position on free speech.
steelstraw 5y ago
And it's not hard to spin things 180 degrees with framing. Basically this media bias cartoon: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c9d2cf6e6e840c133b937692559ae591 https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c9d2cf6e6e840c133b9376... Russell Conjugation is also a powerful tool they often use. I am firm. [Positive empathy] You are obstinate. [Neutral to mildly negative empathy] He/She/It is pigheaded. [Very negative empathy] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181
- edoceo 5y ago
  My framing: What's the difference between persistence and a stubborn asshole? I'm one, you're the other. Mostly gets folk to double-think that it's their perspective that chooses their description.
- Permit 5y ago
  > And it's not hard to spin things 180 degrees with framing. Can we see some examples of this actually happening? Have you seen this before?
  - Auracle 5y ago
    Maybe not 180 degrees, but the major court cases lately: The media largely only showed the video of George Floyd being knelt on, not him freaking out about not being able to breathe before that happened. The Kenosha stuff was quite obviously at least possibly self defense when the whole incident was shown. Both of those may or may not have affected the court cases, but the riots that happened? People’s opinion on them? Oh, just thought of a better one - Nicholas Sandmann. There’s a full 180.
    - Wolfenstein98k 5y ago
      All in one direction, too. Curious.
    - Blahah 5y ago
      > The media largely only showed the video of George Floyd being knelt on, not him freaking out about not being able to breathe before that happened. Are you implying that restricting someone's breathing by kneeling on them would somehow be less bad if that person was already complaining of breathing difficulty?
deleted 5y ago
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unclebucknasty 5y ago
Your setup was WRT political bias, but your meme example was WRT the tedious manner in which they report conclusions. I've not experienced the political bias. Can you link some examples? We have a serious disinformation problem. In my experience, Snopes seems to be overwhelmingly accurate and to do much more good than harm on balance. The fact that they tediously present the facts before drawing a conclusion (per your meme) actually helps to mitigate any perception of bias.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Here is an example of identical claims made by a conservative and democrat politician. https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-6fed2339071d503d32e53144eb852dab.webp https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-6fed2339071d503d32e531...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    Those aren't identical claims; "Canadian homes set thermostats to 0 in the winter of 1800" and "Canadian homes had no heating in the winter of 1800" are not saying the same thing. One says there was on balance no desire for federal tax income, the other says there was no way to have federal tax income whether or not it was desired.
  - unclebucknasty 5y ago
    Well that's not Snopes. But, assuming we're taking these as identical claims (and they are not necessarily), I still don't think that necessarily reflects bias in any case. These were two separate fact checks about two claims worded slightly differently, spaced 3 years apart. They were performed by two different organizations, and also likely performed by different people. That they landed only a degree apart (mostly true vs half true) seems pretty consistent. Certainly doesn't seem like any kind of egregious bias.
  - kristjansson 5y ago
Permit 5y ago
Your comment (and the child comments replying to it) would be much stronger if you could point to actual examples of this happening rather than imagined examples. Personally, I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already hold this position. Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to? Are they anywhere similar to this cricket/baseball example you've given, or are they far less egregious?
- jscipione 5y ago
  - Permit 5y ago
    > Snopes rates the claim that Senator Joe Biden said "we have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics." as false, Snopes rates the claim "In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted to perpetrating voter fraud." as false. These are different claims, aren't they?
    - torstenvl 5y ago
      A mistaken and false admission is still an admission. And he did make such an admission. I believe, and I suspect most reasonable people would believe, that this was a gaffe and that the President did not mean what he said. It is an admission that should be given very little weight. But it remains an admission nonetheless, and it is a lie for Snopes to claim otherwise.
      - jodrellblank 5y ago
        "admit, intransitive verb: To grant to be real, valid, or true; acknowledge or concede. To disclose or confess (guilt or an error, for example). synonym: acknowledge." It can't be both an admission of something real, and a gaffe. If he said "I am a dog" it would be a lie, not an admission that he's a dog (because he simply isn't). Describing an anti-fraud organisation as a fraud organisation is either correct and an admission of a coverup, or false and a mistake and not an admission of anything.
vmception 5y ago
Twitter is the worst! I dont even know what the original viral article/post even looked like, they just decide to promote the fact-checking response I’m always thinking “tune in at 11, where we find out who asked!”
dundarious 5y ago
Snopes has never really been credible beyond their original domain of looking into urban legends and chain mail forwarded by your aunt and uncle. They are also guilty of massive plagiarism, and heavy revision of articles without any notice. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-plagiarism-David-Mikkelson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-pla... But the other fact checkers aren't much better. The Washington Post (in particular Kessler himself) are some of the worst in my opinion.
- tiahura 5y ago
  Why anyone ever took Snopes seriously for anything more important than wether Paul from the Wonder Years was Marilyn Manson defies comprehension.
- jquery 5y ago
  - playguardin 5y ago
  - dundarious 5y ago
    Sure, not all of the output of the "fact checker" article mill has been awful. I think Trump was a bad guy who lied a lot (and Obama, and Bush, and on and on). I find it really obnoxious when these articles are really quite ideological and opinionated, but still use the verbage of "checking the facts". The thing I most take issue with is if something is "mostly false" because a public figure looked at an issue in a way that you don't think is the best way for society to look at an issue. That is an opinion, and to call it "fact checking" is pure ideology. And that is not to say that opinions are trivial or personal observations, less important than facts. There's a lot of bullshit in politics, and you'd be absolutely right and doing a service to call it all out as bullshit, and give your reasoning.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
at_a_remove 5y ago
My personal favorite was something like "No, Trump was not telling the Truth, Clinton did not submerge her servers in acid." prior to the 2016 election. That is when I knew the guy would never get a fair shake, no matter what he did.
- tzs 5y ago
  He said she "acid washed 33000 emails". BTW, he was still saying that years later. From a May 2019 Tweet of his [1]. > Will Jerry Nadler ever look into the fact that Crooked Hillary deleted and acid washed 33,000 emails AFTER getting a most powerful demand notice for them from Congress? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190824131756/https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1129360082783875074?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://web.archive.org/web/20190824131756/https://twitter.c...
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    NBC gave it a big "NOPE" in their fact check: "The Claim Trump says Clinton 'acid washed' her email server. The Truth Clinton's team used an app called BleachBit; she did not use a corrosive chemical." https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465 https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465 This was October 9, 2016. I have no love for the man, but like I said, we were never gonna get the media to be fair about him. Gosh, she did not use a corrosive chemical! SHEESH!
    - Traubenfuchs 5y ago
      > we were never gonna get the media to be fair about him Never forget: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magazine-ice-cream/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magaz...
      - at_a_remove 5y ago
        Watching grown adults freak out about that was just ... I know that history is full of otherwise reasonable people working themselves into a froth about something, and going from there to do whatever terrible things, but to watch it happen over such trivial items was chilling.
WD-42 5y ago
Still no actual examples provided in regard to snopes.
- nootropicat 5y ago
  Claim: Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Verdict: mixture What's Undetermined In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism." (she was sentenced to 58 years and pardoned by Bill Clinton after serving 16) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
  - WD-42 5y ago
    That is an interesting one. Snopes gave it mixed because technically she was never convicted of terrorism by any court, thus isn't actually a "convicted terrorist". In this case a mixed verdict does seem fair as the lack of nuance in the claim doesn't match the reality of the situation.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    There is, for sure, a definition of terrorism (by Alex P. Schmid) agreed upon by academics. It has 12 subchecks though; not simple (unfortunately circumstances require it to be complex as-is). If I were to fact-check this (say as journalist) I would reach out to academics, asking them their take on the matter by presenting them facts (and, perhaps, uncertainties). Apart from that, usually, when it comes to democratic countries with a working objective justice system, I would say we can trust verdicts unless proven otherwise. A presidential pardon could be such, I don't know. I do know the case of Scooter Libby, where presidential pardon was unjustified (Valerie Plame case) but as an outsider of USA I don't know if that is common, and how common (I can imagine its an abused political tool).
0x_rs 5y ago
Fact-checking is absurd. It's a phenomenon that hints at greater problems, solving none. It's offloading critical judgment skills and knowledge (as informed as ony may be, and as broad and shallow one needs to distinguish most misleading or false argumentations, it's been a long time since the "last person to know everything"!), and offloading it to people that don't know better, and may be subject to mass-producing them to satify the massive amounts of misinformation online, or they may be voluntarily or not following certain agendas or philosophies that may not reflect reality, and I believe this ends up with a tendency to extremism and marginalization. Snopes got made fun of a lot in the past, some of their conclusions are abstract and get down to semantics instead of actual facts. At some point the average person should know better. It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages. I regret not finding some of the compilation images, but I found one such example of.. questionable lines of thought. https://archive.is/KrSEn https://archive.is/KrSEn
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  > It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages. So everyone has to thoroughly investigate everything, become experts in all fields, and never rely on those with more education and experience. Thanks, I hate it.
  - 0x_rs 5y ago
    That's a scary prospect, but not what I meant. If they went away, or weren't plastered on any controversial news piece, it's not as if one's judgment and trust of sources would be worthless. What are the qualifications for the average fact-check reporter? I know it's hard to say these things when one of the most profitable and fundamental abilities since the beginning of propaganda has been manipulating the populace and its judgment, but we ought to do better!
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    All because this new generation of journalists are utterly incapable of doing their jobs.
aimor 5y ago
People ask for examples. This is an interesting one where Snopes admits they were wrong, and honorably changes their rating from MOSTLY FALSE to.. Mixture? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/immigrant-girl-never-separated/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/immigrant-girl-never-separ... https://archive.fo/UKPBQ https://archive.fo/UKPBQ Today I learned that Snopes isn't archived by the Wayback Machine. In August of this year Snopes admitted that founder David Mikkelson plagiarized portions of his articles, and as a result are now allowing Wayback Machine to store archives (reversing Mikkelson's policy).
wutbrodo 5y ago
> Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning This is the fundamental, core challenge of epistemology. Most people are staggeringly unintelligent. They suffer from such a deficit of basic critical thinking skills that they need to squeeze all the complexity of the world into a model in which experts have figured out The Absolute Truth and anyone wio disagrees needs to be brutally crushed, or in the modern world, simply silenced. (The similarity to the notions of scripture and heresy is 0% a coincidence). The problem is that this model inevitably undermines its own foundations: the faith that a Science deity hands down truth on clay tablets is only sustained by a process of knowledge-generation that requires a full engagement with the nuance, uncertainty, and ambiguity inherent to trying to understand reality. The simpletons for whom Believe in Science is a dogma are always going to be an obstacle to the process by which those with adult-level cognition _actually create the level of certainty we do have in societal knowledge_. It's encouraging to see that the (obvious) contradictions of a centrally "fact-checked" social media ecosystem are already revealing themselves in ridiculous examples like this. But I'm probably too cynical to be convinced that we won't just blow through to a new equilibrium where an important conduit for communication has a content filter on it that boils down to "don't think things about sensitive topics that a layman would find 'weird' " .
missblit 5y ago
Snopes would usually list that as mostly true or true right? That said I stopped following them when the websaite was taken over by ads and whitespace.
- ravar 5y ago
  Depends if they like the person that did it or not.
hintymad 5y ago
I find it ironic that we are subject to the power of a bunch of people who probably couldn't even read or write proficiently, let alone understanding the basic science.
Volker_W 5y ago
Can you point me to some examples of Snopes being bad?

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Their hit rate on truth is probably 95/100 though as opposed to far left media which has gone flat out bonkers. I'm glad services are there.

yaomtc 5y ago

Whenever I see a Snopes article where the claim is similar to the facts, but some parts are off, they use "Mixed", not "False".

zimpenfish 5y ago

> baseball bat? [...] cricket bat. In my experience, Snopes would have rated that "Mostly true" or "Mixture". Do you have examples where they've given a clearly misleading rating?

hereforphone 5y ago
Are you questioning the veracity of memes sir?
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  No, just checking facts.
_dain_ 5y ago
For example, this whole article just should not exist: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/15/facebook-posts/keystone-xl-suspension-probably-wont-boost-oil-pri/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/15/facebook-p... There is a whole genre of "fact-check" articles of the form: "X says that Y will cause Z to happen. Here's why experts say that's wrong." i.e. "fact-checking" a prediction about something that will happen in the future. Unless you're clairvoyant, that isn't a fact-check because the facts literally haven't happened yet! So any rating at all is misleading. I mean yeah, maybe you could fact-check something that can be predicted with high accuracy, like whether a solar eclipse will happen. But they do it for economic and social and political issues. They just shouldn't, at all. "Fact-checking" is just clever marketing label for meta-journalism, i.e. journalism-about-journalism. It isn't some category that has magically different standards or incentives than ordinary journalism. It perplexes me that smart, skeptical people think that Snopes or Politifact are somehow free from the exact same bias-producing incentives and motivations of every other news outlet.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  When you say that "this whole article just should not exist", are you stating that predictions should never be investigated, validated, measured against the statements of experts? Or are you just quibbling that it shouldn't count as "fact checking"? The former seems silly and the latter gets a shrug from me (who cares if there's a better phrase than "fact checking").
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    Of course the predictions should be investigated and validated, but only after the events have come to pass. If you're going to write something beforehand (e.g. contrasting the predictions of various experts), don't call it a fact-check, because it's not about facts, it's about opinions. Informed, educated opinions yes, but still fundamentally opinions.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      That's fairly absurd on its face. There are many important predictions to be made about medium term outcomes (say, in the 5-25 year range). If someone says "We will never develop grid-level energy storage because elves cannot fly, therefore renewable energy is hopeless", we don't have to wait one second to investigate and (in)validate this claim. If someone says "Sea level will drop by 3m within 15 years because today's cows are farting less", we do no thave to wait 15 years to investigate and (in)validate this. If someone says "Astronomical body N28291k will hit the earth at 13:45 on Dec 2nd 2037", we do not need to wait until 2037 to investigate and validate the claim. If someone says "The cost of coal will decrease by 20% over the next 10 years", when all known reserves of coal are more difficult to access than historical ones and when demand for coal appears to be dropping, we do not need to wait 10 years to investigate and (in)validate this.
syshum 5y ago
I am not sure about Snopes, but Politifact sure has several like the OP's example

junon 5y ago

This is not at all my experience with snopes. They've been pretty transparent from what I've seen.

hereforphone 5y ago
The issue in my opinion is that there are various, almost-equally "true" perspectives that can be reenforced with facts and presented. That there is no single objective truth to all matters means that biases (political, religious, etc.) act as a lens and the "truth" presented on fact-checking sites (and elsewhere) is shaped by this lens. This is why you can have news organizations with different political slants painting a story two entirely different ways, without directly lying.
- junon 5y ago
  I disagree. There are definitely some things that are completely and entirely false, not left up to speculation. My point was more that Snopes tends to indicate when something isn't clear-cut.
  - evv555 5y ago
    Out of curiosity I googled the current state of articles regarding "Wuhan Lab Leak" theory and potential NIH connection to gain of function research. Both issues that aren't clear-cut but have compelling evidence. None of these articles show the nuance you are claiming they would show.
nradov 5y ago
Except for the time that Snopes fact checked this article as "disputed": "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication". (The article was very clearly labeled as satire.) https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008 https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008
- junon 5y ago
  1 is a very small sample set.

dymk 5y ago

Link an example please

Supermancho 5y ago
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-freed-child-rapist-laughed-about-it/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-freed-chil... She chuckled, but she didn't laugh. False? https://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/clintons-1975-rape-case/ https://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/clintons-1975-rape-case/ Well she did laugh. True? Binary opposites for this detail, depending on which you are citing.
- tzs 5y ago
  They both say the same thing. She laughed at some points during the interview, but not about the outcome of the case. A chuckle is a quiet or inward laugh. All chuckles are laughs but not all laughs are chuckles.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    > They both say the same thing. They say some of the same things. The conclusions are different, despite the material to the fact. This is an example, as requested.
- kristjansson 5y ago
  Both links place the 'laughed' piece of the claim in the 'true' column of the analysis, with more accurate characterizations and contextualization of 'about it'

jevoten 5y ago

I think the more salient factor is which facts they choose to check. Better to leave some stories un-checked, so they can be dismissed as only reported by right-wing sources. In one instance, PolitiFact requested NewsBusters to prove a chart on illegal immigration they posted was true, with the implied threat of labeling it false. When NewsBusters complied within the 14 hour window given, proving their claims true, PolitiFact did.. nothing. No post telling NewsBuster's claim was proven true. https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2021/04/21/politifact-asks-us-back-our-chart-when-we-did-nothing-happened https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2021/04/21/p...

shadowgovt 5y ago
Sure, but give examples and you often start to find that the topics are so far afield from reality that they don't merit the cost of a fact-check. Snopes has fact-checked claims that Donald Trump said Earth is flat (false) but not whether Earth is flat, and they won't fact-check that any time soon.
- luckylion 5y ago
  They won't fact-check that if Donald Trump claimed it?
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    No, they won't fact-check "Earth is flat" because it would be a waste of resources; the evidence Earth is a globe is overwhelming.
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JPKab 5y ago
You're being downvoted for no reason I can tell, other than the fact that NewsBuster is a source popular with right-wing audiences. There are people on HN who basically will downvote anything they perceive as being supportive of their political enemies, with no regard to the content of the message. Message to those downvoting this: If your position on free speech changes depending on who is doing the moderating, you don't have a position on free speech.

steelstraw 5y ago

And it's not hard to spin things 180 degrees with framing. Basically this media bias cartoon: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c9d2cf6e6e840c133b937692559ae591 https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c9d2cf6e6e840c133b9376... Russell Conjugation is also a powerful tool they often use. I am firm. [Positive empathy] You are obstinate. [Neutral to mildly negative empathy] He/She/It is pigheaded. [Very negative empathy] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181

edoceo 5y ago
My framing: What's the difference between persistence and a stubborn asshole? I'm one, you're the other. Mostly gets folk to double-think that it's their perspective that chooses their description.
Permit 5y ago
> And it's not hard to spin things 180 degrees with framing. Can we see some examples of this actually happening? Have you seen this before?
- Auracle 5y ago
  Maybe not 180 degrees, but the major court cases lately: The media largely only showed the video of George Floyd being knelt on, not him freaking out about not being able to breathe before that happened. The Kenosha stuff was quite obviously at least possibly self defense when the whole incident was shown. Both of those may or may not have affected the court cases, but the riots that happened? People’s opinion on them? Oh, just thought of a better one - Nicholas Sandmann. There’s a full 180.
  - Wolfenstein98k 5y ago
    All in one direction, too. Curious.
  - Blahah 5y ago
    > The media largely only showed the video of George Floyd being knelt on, not him freaking out about not being able to breathe before that happened. Are you implying that restricting someone's breathing by kneeling on them would somehow be less bad if that person was already complaining of breathing difficulty?

deleted 5y ago

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unclebucknasty 5y ago

Your setup was WRT political bias, but your meme example was WRT the tedious manner in which they report conclusions. I've not experienced the political bias. Can you link some examples? We have a serious disinformation problem. In my experience, Snopes seems to be overwhelmingly accurate and to do much more good than harm on balance. The fact that they tediously present the facts before drawing a conclusion (per your meme) actually helps to mitigate any perception of bias.

missedthecue 5y ago
Here is an example of identical claims made by a conservative and democrat politician. https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-6fed2339071d503d32e53144eb852dab.webp https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-6fed2339071d503d32e531...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  Those aren't identical claims; "Canadian homes set thermostats to 0 in the winter of 1800" and "Canadian homes had no heating in the winter of 1800" are not saying the same thing. One says there was on balance no desire for federal tax income, the other says there was no way to have federal tax income whether or not it was desired.
- unclebucknasty 5y ago
  Well that's not Snopes. But, assuming we're taking these as identical claims (and they are not necessarily), I still don't think that necessarily reflects bias in any case. These were two separate fact checks about two claims worded slightly differently, spaced 3 years apart. They were performed by two different organizations, and also likely performed by different people. That they landed only a degree apart (mostly true vs half true) seems pretty consistent. Certainly doesn't seem like any kind of egregious bias.
- kristjansson 5y ago

Permit 5y ago

Your comment (and the child comments replying to it) would be much stronger if you could point to actual examples of this happening rather than imagined examples. Personally, I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already hold this position. Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to? Are they anywhere similar to this cricket/baseball example you've given, or are they far less egregious?

jscipione 5y ago
- Permit 5y ago
  > Snopes rates the claim that Senator Joe Biden said "we have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics." as false, Snopes rates the claim "In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted to perpetrating voter fraud." as false. These are different claims, aren't they?
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    A mistaken and false admission is still an admission. And he did make such an admission. I believe, and I suspect most reasonable people would believe, that this was a gaffe and that the President did not mean what he said. It is an admission that should be given very little weight. But it remains an admission nonetheless, and it is a lie for Snopes to claim otherwise.
    - jodrellblank 5y ago
      "admit, intransitive verb: To grant to be real, valid, or true; acknowledge or concede. To disclose or confess (guilt or an error, for example). synonym: acknowledge." It can't be both an admission of something real, and a gaffe. If he said "I am a dog" it would be a lie, not an admission that he's a dog (because he simply isn't). Describing an anti-fraud organisation as a fraud organisation is either correct and an admission of a coverup, or false and a mistake and not an admission of anything.

vmception 5y ago

Twitter is the worst! I dont even know what the original viral article/post even looked like, they just decide to promote the fact-checking response I’m always thinking “tune in at 11, where we find out who asked!”

dundarious 5y ago

Snopes has never really been credible beyond their original domain of looking into urban legends and chain mail forwarded by your aunt and uncle. They are also guilty of massive plagiarism, and heavy revision of articles without any notice. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-plagiarism-David-Mikkelson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-pla... But the other fact checkers aren't much better. The Washington Post (in particular Kessler himself) are some of the worst in my opinion.

tiahura 5y ago
Why anyone ever took Snopes seriously for anything more important than wether Paul from the Wonder Years was Marilyn Manson defies comprehension.
jquery 5y ago
- playguardin 5y ago
- dundarious 5y ago
  Sure, not all of the output of the "fact checker" article mill has been awful. I think Trump was a bad guy who lied a lot (and Obama, and Bush, and on and on). I find it really obnoxious when these articles are really quite ideological and opinionated, but still use the verbage of "checking the facts". The thing I most take issue with is if something is "mostly false" because a public figure looked at an issue in a way that you don't think is the best way for society to look at an issue. That is an opinion, and to call it "fact checking" is pure ideology. And that is not to say that opinions are trivial or personal observations, less important than facts. There's a lot of bullshit in politics, and you'd be absolutely right and doing a service to call it all out as bullshit, and give your reasoning.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago

at_a_remove 5y ago

My personal favorite was something like "No, Trump was not telling the Truth, Clinton did not submerge her servers in acid." prior to the 2016 election. That is when I knew the guy would never get a fair shake, no matter what he did.

tzs 5y ago
He said she "acid washed 33000 emails". BTW, he was still saying that years later. From a May 2019 Tweet of his [1]. > Will Jerry Nadler ever look into the fact that Crooked Hillary deleted and acid washed 33,000 emails AFTER getting a most powerful demand notice for them from Congress? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190824131756/https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1129360082783875074?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://web.archive.org/web/20190824131756/https://twitter.c...
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  NBC gave it a big "NOPE" in their fact check: "The Claim Trump says Clinton 'acid washed' her email server. The Truth Clinton's team used an app called BleachBit; she did not use a corrosive chemical." https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465 https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465 This was October 9, 2016. I have no love for the man, but like I said, we were never gonna get the media to be fair about him. Gosh, she did not use a corrosive chemical! SHEESH!
  - Traubenfuchs 5y ago
    > we were never gonna get the media to be fair about him Never forget: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magazine-ice-cream/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magaz...
    - at_a_remove 5y ago
      Watching grown adults freak out about that was just ... I know that history is full of otherwise reasonable people working themselves into a froth about something, and going from there to do whatever terrible things, but to watch it happen over such trivial items was chilling.

WD-42 5y ago

Still no actual examples provided in regard to snopes.

nootropicat 5y ago
Claim: Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Verdict: mixture What's Undetermined In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism." (she was sentenced to 58 years and pardoned by Bill Clinton after serving 16) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
- WD-42 5y ago
  That is an interesting one. Snopes gave it mixed because technically she was never convicted of terrorism by any court, thus isn't actually a "convicted terrorist". In this case a mixed verdict does seem fair as the lack of nuance in the claim doesn't match the reality of the situation.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  There is, for sure, a definition of terrorism (by Alex P. Schmid) agreed upon by academics. It has 12 subchecks though; not simple (unfortunately circumstances require it to be complex as-is). If I were to fact-check this (say as journalist) I would reach out to academics, asking them their take on the matter by presenting them facts (and, perhaps, uncertainties). Apart from that, usually, when it comes to democratic countries with a working objective justice system, I would say we can trust verdicts unless proven otherwise. A presidential pardon could be such, I don't know. I do know the case of Scooter Libby, where presidential pardon was unjustified (Valerie Plame case) but as an outsider of USA I don't know if that is common, and how common (I can imagine its an abused political tool).

0x_rs 5y ago

Fact-checking is absurd. It's a phenomenon that hints at greater problems, solving none. It's offloading critical judgment skills and knowledge (as informed as ony may be, and as broad and shallow one needs to distinguish most misleading or false argumentations, it's been a long time since the "last person to know everything"!), and offloading it to people that don't know better, and may be subject to mass-producing them to satify the massive amounts of misinformation online, or they may be voluntarily or not following certain agendas or philosophies that may not reflect reality, and I believe this ends up with a tendency to extremism and marginalization. Snopes got made fun of a lot in the past, some of their conclusions are abstract and get down to semantics instead of actual facts. At some point the average person should know better. It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages. I regret not finding some of the compilation images, but I found one such example of.. questionable lines of thought. https://archive.is/KrSEn https://archive.is/KrSEn

mrtranscendence 5y ago
> It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages. So everyone has to thoroughly investigate everything, become experts in all fields, and never rely on those with more education and experience. Thanks, I hate it.
- 0x_rs 5y ago
  That's a scary prospect, but not what I meant. If they went away, or weren't plastered on any controversial news piece, it's not as if one's judgment and trust of sources would be worthless. What are the qualifications for the average fact-check reporter? I know it's hard to say these things when one of the most profitable and fundamental abilities since the beginning of propaganda has been manipulating the populace and its judgment, but we ought to do better!
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  All because this new generation of journalists are utterly incapable of doing their jobs.

aimor 5y ago

People ask for examples. This is an interesting one where Snopes admits they were wrong, and honorably changes their rating from MOSTLY FALSE to.. Mixture? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/immigrant-girl-never-separated/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/immigrant-girl-never-separ... https://archive.fo/UKPBQ https://archive.fo/UKPBQ Today I learned that Snopes isn't archived by the Wayback Machine. In August of this year Snopes admitted that founder David Mikkelson plagiarized portions of his articles, and as a result are now allowing Wayback Machine to store archives (reversing Mikkelson's policy).

wutbrodo 5y ago

> Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning This is the fundamental, core challenge of epistemology. Most people are staggeringly unintelligent. They suffer from such a deficit of basic critical thinking skills that they need to squeeze all the complexity of the world into a model in which experts have figured out The Absolute Truth and anyone wio disagrees needs to be brutally crushed, or in the modern world, simply silenced. (The similarity to the notions of scripture and heresy is 0% a coincidence). The problem is that this model inevitably undermines its own foundations: the faith that a Science deity hands down truth on clay tablets is only sustained by a process of knowledge-generation that requires a full engagement with the nuance, uncertainty, and ambiguity inherent to trying to understand reality. The simpletons for whom Believe in Science is a dogma are always going to be an obstacle to the process by which those with adult-level cognition _actually create the level of certainty we do have in societal knowledge_. It's encouraging to see that the (obvious) contradictions of a centrally "fact-checked" social media ecosystem are already revealing themselves in ridiculous examples like this. But I'm probably too cynical to be convinced that we won't just blow through to a new equilibrium where an important conduit for communication has a content filter on it that boils down to "don't think things about sensitive topics that a layman would find 'weird' " .

missblit 5y ago

Snopes would usually list that as mostly true or true right? That said I stopped following them when the websaite was taken over by ads and whitespace.

ravar 5y ago
Depends if they like the person that did it or not.

hintymad 5y ago

I find it ironic that we are subject to the power of a bunch of people who probably couldn't even read or write proficiently, let alone understanding the basic science.

Volker_W 5y ago

Can you point me to some examples of Snopes being bad?