Snopes fact-checking the satire site Babylon Bee suggests to me that their days of being a valuable resource are over. Any reasonable people at Snopes apparently no longer have any influence.
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.”
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."
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
To believe that Schiff would doctor transcripts is ridiculous, especially because there are quite a few republicans in the room who would immediately jump on any opportunity to nail him to the nearest cross if he were to do something like that. In a situation where Adam Schiff and Donald Trump claim opposites your safe bet would be on Schiff.
Think about it this way: Adam Schiffs reputation can be damaged by mere paraphrasing of someone else's words, Trump could say anything and it would not damage his reputation.
I never said he doctored transcripts, I said he cherry picked bits of the transcripts to release to support his narrative.
But he did claim Trump said things in the call that he did not, in a statement he made to Congress.
Also, Schiff has been on RT numerous times. Why would an American congressman make statements on a news outlet controlled by the Russian government? Nothing about this guy is trustworthy. He also claimed for two years they had definite proof of corruption.
> I said he cherry picked bits of the transcripts to release to support his narrative.
And what would that narrative be? The only narrative I'm aware of has been confirmed by Trump himself - and in writing no less.
> But he did claim Trump said things in the call that he did not, in a statement he made to Congress.
Are you serious? Did you actually believe for one second that a paraphrasing should be taken as a literal quote?
> Why would an American congressman make statements on a news outlet controlled by the Russian government?
Are you seriously suggesting that Adam Schiff is in the pocket of Putin? If you believe that about Schiff then you should have serious problems with the current occupant of the White House, who it seems can't wait to do Russia's bidding at every possible turn.
Schiff's reputation doesn't ride on twisting of words, it rides on how much he's participating in the activities that he's supposed to be in charge of investigating.
Nobody's saying pick a side between the two. Be sceptical of every politician. Don't pick either one as your character reference for a narrative.
(That said, I don't mean any of the following to be exonerating or damning to Trump.)
I find it troubling that Schiff appears to have taken an abrupt change in strategy, once he was accused of meeting with the "whistleblower" before the claim was filed. The timeline doesn't look good, especially when considering the change in IG whistleblower rules.
And cherry-picked leaks are a giant problem in DC right now.
Regardless, you don't need to necessarily change a transcript if you told (coached) the witness what to say (or how to say it) in the first place.
It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
And that applies no matter how innocent or guilty Trump is of anything.
I'd say meeting with the whistleblower is well within the job description for the leader of the committee.
As for being skeptical of every politician, Schiff has so far been pretty clean in all this as opposed to the counterparty, who seem to have made a bonfire of all the rulebooks and are running the United States over a cliff at a speed that I would have considered impossible a decade ago. Suddenly all those questions about how Germany could have slid off as fast as it did from being a reasonable country to a totalitarian state make good sense. All it takes is a small bag of money, a couple of Stephen Millers and you're good to go.
The good news if you can call it good news is that they are going about it in the most stupid way possible and that just maybe there is an outside chance that the United States constitution was drawn up in such a way that this travesty can be brought to a halt. I fear it may be too late though, with the recent stacking of the Supreme Court and the way in which all these puppets are in various pockets we may very well be in the endgame for that country and what it stood for.
It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you, but that doesn't mean they're out to get you for the wrong reasons. You may simply deserve being 'got' and put in jail. In the case of the Trump family and their grifting hangers on that's a slam dunk, that they just might end up being censored (at worst) or pushed out (at best) because some people come to their senses and put their country over their party is about equal to getting Al Capone on tax evasion. Works for me though.
> Regardless, you don't need to necessarily change a transcript if you told (coached) the witness what to say (or how to say it) in the first place.
Not sure if you are aware of it but the 'transcript' of the call was published by Trump and the transcripts of the various depositions appear to have been made without any coaching whatsoever, if you sincerely believe that witnesses have been coached then you have crossed a line somewhere that you probably should not have crossed.
Why must everyone act like criticism of other politicians is somehow defending Trump?
The committee could question him, on the record. Oversight responsibilities are, by definition, reactive, hands off, public, and transparent. Any one-on-one should have been through the IG, not Schiff.
Regardless, impeachment is an inherently political process (as was intended), which means optics matter. And Schiff has really screwed this aspect of it up, no matter how "relatively clean" he might seem compared to other politicians.
If there's one thing Americans hate more than corrupt politicians, it's hypocritical corrupt politicians. If there are two things, it's that and being backed into a corner, politically.
Both are reasons why Trump was elected in the first place, even though I'd argue most of his voters weren't as thrilled about voting for him as he'd have you believe.
Schiff's methods are only serving to stir this up again, regardless of whether some think the ends justify the means.
>if you sincerely believe that witnesses have been coached then you have crossed a line somewhere that you probably should not have crossed.
Because politicians would never do something so corrupt? We'll see what comes out. But at this point, Schiff needs to do some serious disclosures on what was discussed between him and the witnesses before the report was filed, including if he suggested waiting on the timing, for the IG rule change.
Which is why he should never have put himself in that position to begin with. It soils the integrity of the entire thing. It stops looking like an investigation, and starts looking like an orchestrated coup.
If Al Capone's prosecutor would have been caught doing such things, they wouldn't have even gotten him on the tax charges.
If Trump gets impeached, but the prosecution looks dirty, it'll all but guarantee he's re-elected. The sense of injustice will motivate voters far more than whoever's name happens to be on the ballet.
I'm not saying that's what should happen, only what's likely.
You seem to misunderstand some basics: using political power to dictate the course of investigations for personal gain is what the problem is, not the use of political power to dictate the course of investigations as such.
Very true. Which is also why I don't get why so many Dems are supporting this so enthusiastically. As much as I never thought I'd say this, Pelosi had the right idea for how to play this, politically, until she caved. She seems to be the one thinking more than 2-3 steps ahead.
But I also think you're giving them too much credit, because I really doubt they think they're going to suffer, politically. (The enthusiasts anyway, not those who supported Pelosi's slow play.)
> Which is also why I don't get why so many Dems are supporting this so enthusiastically.
Because they are trying to limit the damage to their country. Which is substantial already, to put it mildly. Give Trump some more times and you may find yourself in an unrecoverable situation. This Ukraine mess is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
An article like the CNN industrial washer story would clearly not be believed by a significant percentage of people.
I'm sure it wouldn't be believed by a significant percentage of people, but "no reasonable person would believe this" has never been Snopes's standard. If you take a meander through their whole database, there are a lot of articles that will make you go "come on, who would even ask about something this stupid?".
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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).
> 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
There's a very good reason that people going to Snopes for claims originating in such sites aren't redirected that way, and that's because the claims often get separated from the originating site as soon as someone believes them and decided repeating them as original(or in the form of an unsourced meme) is the best way of sharing them.
Of course, the Snopes article on the claim should mention the satirical original source, but that's no reason not to do everything else Snopes would normally do to address a claim about which they have received questions.
If we're conducting an arms race against someone who wants to deliberately obscure the source of disinformation, we're going to lose that by attrition, flat out, following the same basic argument I made originally.
Snopes, and anyone else actively trying to combat disinformation, absolutely have to use their resources wisely, the enemy has a lot more money and time.
This is by design. If "fake news" is the threat of the day, you need only paint your target with the "fake news" label and nukes will be launched against it. Babylon Bee leans conservative, and when those who cloak themselves in hard-left rhetoric are in the crosshairs of ridicule, they tend to retaliate hard, with whatever means they have to hand.
This is not a matter of targeting as much as it's a matter of people falling for satire and not having the ability or resources to tell the difference. If it was really that easy to "launch nukes" against a site, then something like Snopes as a whole would be ineffective.
> when those who cloak themselves in hard-left rhetoric are in the crosshairs of ridicule, they tend to retaliate hard, with whatever means they have to hand.
That's complete nonsense, and not a partisan or "hard-left-only" reaction. The right also tries to de-platform the left, if you're trying to make "fake news" a partisan issue, you're contributing to the problem.
But the left has home court advantage: the sympathetic ears of upper management at Facebook, Google, Twitter, and most of the major news outlets without "Fox" in their name.
Snopes chose to target, among other things, a Babylon Bee article talking about how CNN bought industrial laundry equipment to spin their news. The only people who could possibly be confused that this is real news are toddlers who have not yet developed abstract thinking and would be confused by the whole thing anyway. It's a strong indication that Snopes is engaging in the culture war as an interested party. It's not a good look for a supposedly disinterested fact checker.
You make too many assumptions. The snopes article on this is two paragraphs long and puts little effort into debunking, as it needs little effort. But for whatever reason, people ask them to look into it. For other reasons, people like you seem to think this diminishes snopes. It doesn't.
I think poor satire is to blame for being buried, not snopes. When the lines are blurred between misinformation and satire, and a relatively unknown satire website with an obvious agenda produces articles that walk that line, maybe they have it coming because simply put, they aren't very good.
> Actual headline: "Did CNN Purchase an Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News"
What line does this walk? Things that are even physically possible and things that are not? I just can't believe Snopes dedicated cycles to debunking this.
Thankfully it got some press and they changed the label to "satire". I can't tell exactly when because the snopes link has been excluded from the way back machine (for whatever reason).
But a lot just turns on being juxtaposed against a prerequisite belief that's not universal. If you don't share that belief, it won't be funny to you. That doesn't (necessarily) make it bad satire.
Sure, and I'm trying to be objective but I believe my assertion is universal. If your content is poor, your return is poor.
Perhaps the publication should look inward, not outward, and realize the lines between misinformation and satire are paper thin. Somehow, and perhaps its branding, The Onion manages to maintain humor and absurdity with very little room for interpreting it's content as anything but satire.
The Onion is, literally, fake news regardless of whether one finds them funny or not. The question is whether people think it's true not whether they think it's funny and that's the only decision being made by a fact-check.
Different standards were not applied. Where are you getting that from?
Forum users posted the article from BB asking for it to be debunked. They haven't posted a request for articles from the Onion and that's likely because the Onion is well-known enough for people to know it's satire.
> because a false rating leads to being buried by Google and Facebook
If Facebook and/or Google punish a satire site for having articles marked false by a fact-checker, that's a problem with Facebook and/or Google for responding improperly to fact-check of satire, not a problem with the fact-checker, which is doing exactly their job.
> Asking for someone or something to be investigated isn't necessarily a de-facto innocence excuse.
It is for a fact checker if what is produced is a honest and accurate fact check of the claims presented. It may not be for the questioner if they are trying to game a system where third parties do dumb things based on what fact checkers do, but that's a problem with the questioner and the third parties, not the fact checker.
If a fact checker can't (or chooses not to) distinguish satire from news, it very much is a problem with the fact checker, regardless of Facebook or Google's over-reliance on them (right or wrong).
At the time, (until ~Feb 2019) Snopes fact checkers for Facebook were separate from the sites traditional authors. They would have known exactly that what they were doing resulted in blacklisting.
> If a fact checker can't (or chooses not to) distinguish satire from news, it very much is a problem with the fact checker
When Snopes does a fact-check of a claim whose original source is satire, they clearly identify both the source and the satirical nature, so whether or not one were to agree with your hypothetical, it doesn't seem applicable to the actual situation being discussed.
> At the time, (until ~Feb 2019) Snopes fact checkers for Facebook were separate from the sites traditional authors. They would have known exactly that what they were doing resulted in blacklisting.
That's perhaps an argument as to why Snopes should have refused to fact check for Facebook on ethical grounds but, having been employed to do so, it's not a reason they should not have fact checked all claims put before them.
Though social feed including reshares of satirical sources as news is an increasingly important source of “news”, so I’m not sure there's a problem here besides Facebook lacking sufficient AI to distinguish when a story (whether in original presentation or resharing which can alter context and reach less-familiar audiences) is likely to read as news vs. satire by the recipient and only apply any penalty from negative fact check results in the context where it would otherwise be seen as news. This isn't the pre-web (or even pre-social-media) environment where a publication reaches mainly people familiar with it's nature and actively seeking it out, and that's particularly true when the venue is specifically Facebook.
> The only people who could possibly be confused that this is real news are toddlers
Have you been away from the internet for the last couple of years? There is literally nothing on the internet so fantastical that it won't be posted to social media stripped of context and believed by somebody.
Snopes doesn't de-platform anyone. Your beef is rightly with Google or Facebook.
Snopes labels things that are false as false. This includes many or most satirical articles. Given the number of times I've told someone that a thing is false and had to provide a scopes link before they would even start to believe me, I'm very grateful for snopes.
No, it's not. Every single one of those articles stems from a post on their forum where it's been requested. They regularly pick them based on their popularity in the forum. As long as they're consistent with that, it's completely possible to address these specific instances.
It's not a filter for bias and no one has claimed that it is. It's a filter for whether or not to address the content of a claim. Popularity is absolutely a reasonable filter for that and that seems to be what Snopes is using, regardless of politics, satire, or otherwise.
> The only people who could possibly be confused that this is real news are toddlers who have not yet developed abstract thinking and would be confused by the whole thing anyway.
An actual Congressional representative fell for an Onion article titled "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex".
> "I was kind of on the fence in the beginning," says the made-up person, Marcy Kolrath, in the article. "But after a couple of margaritas and a ride down the lazy river they've got circling the place, I got caught up in the vibe. By the time it was over, I almost wished I could've aborted twins and gotten to stay a little longer."
Our congressmen are as dumb as toddlers. What else is new? The parent probably should have specified that no person with a brain could be fooled by such articles. That would have ruled out politicians like this congressman.
>The only people who could possibly be confused that this is real news are toddlers who have not yet developed abstract thinking and would be confused by the whole thing anyway.
Or a geriatric toddler whose has long since lost his capacity for abstract thinking due to dementia, and would be easily confused by Rudolph Giuliani pedaling ridiculous conspiracy theories that stroke his ego about Russia having nothing to do with interference in the election, if you know who I mean.
> Articles like this do not make them neutral. They are only designed to make them look neutral.
Are you asserting, then, that the stories about left-wing idiots are true, but the ones about right-wing idiots are false? I'm honestly curious. Are all of the linked Twitter accounts secret false-flag trolls?
Not at all... Just that there's a great deal of nuance that goes into many of these Snopes articles that is designed to flip the question so that it might be answered in a favorable way.
Just covering an opposing viewpoint doesn't mean it's covered in a neutral way.
They're all things that someone actually thought was real. For example, they quote multiple Twitter users who apparently believed that U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar said "If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?" https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/omar-if-israel-is-so-innoc...
It seems disingenuous to act like Snopes is targeting right-wingers specifically. There are gullible idiots everywhere on the political spectrum.
Edit: Someone is downvote-brigading every post in this thread defending Snopes. I would honestly like to hear what you think is not factual about my comment.
You don't have to be left or right to fall for this sort of stuff. However, to assume the right is targeted does demonstrate a low opinion of the right.
Unfortunately, for every case like this, it seems like there is another of satire about Pelosi spending billions on impeachment being treated as truth. I just saw that one the other day with lots of little angry reactions from people who didn't consider the source.
How so? If there are people out there who believe it enough to ask about it and post on their forums, then it's not as clear of satire as you're making it out to be and there's motivation for them to cover it.
About news being spun in a literal washing machine? Seriously?
I hope I got this straight. There are actually people claiming that news are spun in a literal washing machine, and the amount of those is big enough to raise a concern (to be honest, even a single one is a concern). Do you have any sources for this? Absolutely incredible. I wonder what temperature and what detergent is used when spinning news in a washing machine.
What you're saying is literally the entire point, though. There are actual posts on the Snopes forum asking for that page to be debunked. Whether it's because they didn't actually read the article, didn't understand it, or any number of reasons the fact is that there are requests for it.
This is exactly why Snopes is a valuable resource, in my opinion. People today can't be bothered to think critically so they just accept things because it fits their pre-decided narrative.
As ceejayoz mentioned elsewhere, an actual Congressional representative fell for an Onion article titled "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex" with margaritas and a water park. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republican-congressman-falls-vi...
Yes, there are people--not many people, but some, on both sides of the political aisle--who will knee-jerk repost anything that sounds like it might make their opponents look bad. Most of the time, I hope, it's because they skimmed the headline and got emotional before reading the details or thinking critically. But it undeniably happens.
A simple comparison between Babylon Bee and The Onion suggests to me that an overwhelming majority of comedy writers lean liberal.
In any case, it would surely suffice to replace the red X or green check with a comedy mask icon captioned "Satire". Then they can explain the joke, and deconstruct the comedic theory behind it. This is very important, because for a lot of that Babylon Bee stuff, I have no clue why anyone would think it's funny.
":) Satire
"This was published by JokeyMcFakenews, a known purveyor of satirical articles. The text is templated from an inside-joke format known as a 'copypasta', but substituting Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for the male duck in the original, reproduced here for context: [quote block].
"The humor arises from callback to the already-familiar humor of the inside joke, combined with Mnuchin being an actual Bond villain instead of common waterfowl, and presumably having a far more sinister attitude towards bread crumbs."
>surely suffice to replace the red X or green check with a comedy mask icon captioned "Satire".
Literally the only good comment on this entire thread related to BabylonBee.
People fell for it and requests were made to debunk it. It doesn't have to be determined as true or false since it's not intended to be taken seriously.
Once the principled founders are gone it will just turn into an ad platform with the content curators squeezed to the breaking point for the sake of profit.
Your criticism here seems intellectually dishonest to me. The claim is mostly false. Democrats != The Democratic Party. Based on that, the handful of Democrats that attempted to file articles without the support of the rest of the party don't really support the claim that "The Democratic party has tried to impeach" and, as mentioned in the article, one of those was a bipartisan attempt but still counts.
That means that, at best, 2 of the 6 examples count as "The Democratic party" and, at worst, 3 of the 6 if you count Nixon.
If you read the article, the original claim was "Democrats" have tried to impeach every republican president since Eisenhower. It was Snopes that changed it to "The Democratic Party".
Even without that change, the claim is false, though. The claim says that Democrats have attempted to impeach every Republican President. That's false.
Additionally, by the criteria you're suggesting, I would wonder then, by extension, if Republicans have attempted to impeach every Democratic President if the only criteria is that some Republican filed for it as opposed to it being a party decision.
If you treat it as a binary claim, then you could argue it is false. A more accurate description would be "Mostly True" as 5 out of 6 is a large majority.
Republicans may well have tried to impeach every Democrat president. I have no idea. If that is the case, then I hope Snopes has an article fact checking it in a fair way.
Except that's not true. The article links to the image in question which shows the word "every" used in it. Unless you have evidence (like a link from archive.org) that shows that they changed that image, they're not using any tactics. They're using the claim that was sent to them.
I meant it only as an illustrative example, in this case, of how easy it is to flip the answer. I don't know the specifics of this particular claim.
They are not always using the claim sent to them, and they've been busted dozens of times for changing a claim, instead of changing the result. It's selectively choosing which "original" to use.
>they've been busted dozens of times for changing a claim
You keep repeating this claim over and over without any evidence whatsoever that this is happening. Even the cases you've posted have no indication that anything was changed to re-frame a result and yet you keep arguing that they're selectively choosing the question and, on top of that, all of them include an image of the original claim, irrespective of what they chose as the title of their page.
>If only Snopes didn't ask archive. org to scrub the entire site.
As with almost all of your other claims, a citation or source is needed.
Edit: On top of that, there are several other archive sites that do, in fact, have Snopes articles linked. So, you tell me... why would Snopes "go after" one archive site and not another?
Most articles aren't archived or have also been scrubbed. Or only have a single recent version archived. For instance archive.is has entries for maybe 2000 out of the 10s of thousands Snopes articles. Of those, less than 5% have multiple archived versions.
This isn't exactly the type of site I'd usually reference, but this woman recorded quite a few page delta's about gmo food and Monsanto, and the Snopes pages getting edited after large ad buys by the company.
Er, I read through the article and I'd agree with Snopes on this one. They present a pretty good argument. If you change the claim to 5/6 it becomes technically correct (the best kind of correct!), but the nuance that Snopes presents in the article is extremely compelling for why it is mostly false. Three of those 5 impeachments didn't even make it out of committee to go in front of the house, they were only introduced (and any rep can introduce anything crazy they'd like, including articles of impeachment) and one of the impeachments was Nixon which had bipartisan support.
The problem is, you can no longer trust Snopes to ask the "original" question. They've been caught changing the question at least dozens of times to be able to not change a wrong answer.
That's not as much of an issue anymore, since they just change the question from the start now.
Eh, part of the reason why fact-checking "satire" sites became necessary is that some propaganda outlets have taken to using "it's just satire, bro" as an all-purpose cover applied to blatant lies that don't even try to be funny. The people behind "Q" and all the other extreme-right fantasy-world nonsense have a vested interest in keeping the line between serious racism/calls-to-violence/libel/etc and "just joeks" as fuzzy as possible.
Alex Jones, for example, famously claims to be a satirist when it's convenient for him (e.g. when he's about to lose custody of his kids, or when he loses a lawsuit to the Sandy Hook parents that he slandered), but demands to be taken seriously on the same exact topics at other times.
Except the Babylon Bee always writes satire and nothing but satire. It's not like they publish some serious stuff and fail to properly delineate factual vs. satirical reporting, they publish satire only and the "about us" section makes that clear. Your analogy attempts to demonstrate that the site is "playing both sides" and claiming to be factual and satirical, when that is clearly not the case.
It seems to me like they write some things that are obviously satire, and some things that a reasonable person would have a hard time differentiating from non-satire. This is what I'd expect a propaganda outlet utilizing the strategy I described to do.
Sure, but, like porn and art, we can tell the difference between Info Wars and The Onion. A simple landing page on The Onion or Babylon Bee is all Snopes needs to do, whereas it's clear Info Wars has an agenda of spreading disinformation and it's useful combatting specific articles of theirs.
Last I knew, Snopes isn't and cannot be run as a simple application of objective rules. You can follow guidelines, but debunking the type of Info Wars, or Trumpian, disinformation requires more mental effort than that. If it didn't, if it was the simple application of objective rules, there would be little value in the site.
You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time ... but in general, while people may be fooled by The Onion a few times, they tend to learn and do better in the future.
- Abraham Lincoln
- Michael Scott
"Snopes fact-checked a right-wing parody site, therefore they're biased for the left" is a meme that gets mentioned weekly on any political argument/discussion forum. It sounds persuasive as long as you don't look to see whether they fact-check left-wing parody sites too.
I will take the reply-less downvotes to mean "I wish that weren't true." Feel free to search 'site:snopes.com "the onion"' if you like.
Snopes and its staff may well be left-leaning (everything is left-leaning if you're right-leaning enough, and vice versa) but their tiff with the Babylon Bee is not evidence of it.
Yes and, by the same logic, most of the people responding to your comment, despite its veracity, will be people that took issue with it and so they'll be right-leaning.
I think you're 100% right that it's the "I wish it weren't true" crowd because, if it was, they would have reveled in assailing you with links to the contrary.
