This is really sad to me. Snopes, for the most part, is pretty impartial with their fact-checking and I think it's an invaluable resource. If it were to go away and be replaced with something less established, it would be the end of an era and all because they don't have enough money to protect themselves from the litigation of a larger company. If that doesn't show you our legal system is effed, then I don't know what does. Victims can literally be silenced simply by being drowned in litigation by someone with more money.
Snopes stopped being impartial a few years ago in favor of being more clickbaity. There was a whole lot of drama and it's been under different ownership since.
My impression is that only part of the ownership has changed, and that's part of the reason for this lawsuit. David Mikkelson owns 50%, while Barbara Mikkelson sold her 50% to the shareholders of the company that handled Snopes' advertising. Those people have since been in a legal battle with David and/or Snopes, and now acquired Salon, which apparently they're now using to continue their legal battle? It's not really clear what Salon has to do with the whole thing, other than that it got acquired by the people suing David Mikkelson/Snopes.
Well for one thing, the majority of the articles seem to be done by completely 3rd party authors, without mention of vetting, conflicts, or bias.
>More troubling is that we simply don’t know who contributed to a given fact check. David noted that Snopes’ “process is a highly collaborative one in which several different people may contribute to a single article,” but that “the result is typically credited to whoever wrote the initial draft.” David did not respond to a request for comment on why Snopes only lists a single author for each of its fact checks, rather than provide an acknowledgement section that lists all of the individuals who contributed to a given fact check.
It's the same problem Wikipedia sometimes has. Selectively pick sources that confirm the story you want to convey, and ignore the others.
The other big problem recently is to spin something that's true as being false, by slightly changing the question, to be broad enough to encompass an "out."
Also this story covers most of the history of what's in the linked article, from over 3 years ago.
The claim is correct, and the article even acknowledges that. They then throw in a bit about "negative wealth" amongst the world's poor and somehow award it "Three Pinocchios" as a result.
This article is not from Snopes. The question is about the integrity of Snopes and whether or not they re-frame questions to fit a political spin. The Washington Post has been found to have done this on numerous occasions.
Here's one- The original claim was about a viral tweet- a photo at the Whitehouse with 33 X's over the faces of supposed congressmen that had been voted out since voting against Obamacare.
Since there were 33 x's, and that many Republicans had been voted out of Congress, they said true.
But in the original picture, many of the X's were reelected, and many weren't even in Congress to begin with.
The author has since retracted the tweet, and admitted it was fake. But Snopes just rephrased the question and left it as true.
>Since there were 33 x's, and that many Republicans had been voted out of Congress, they said true.
That is not at all what the article you linked states. Not only does the article confirm that some of the X's in the picture were not in Congress but it provides a specific list that shows that, for those who were, the claim is accurate.
The original claim was those specific people were voted out of Congress. Not that it's representative of the general quantity.
The claim in the title that they edited might be true, but the original claim from Twitter is not. That's the whole point. From the article:
>this one got the general idea and numbers correct (even if the persons actually pictured in the accompanying photograph are difficult or impossible to identify).
Difficult or impossible to identify? Dozens of others have done it, and even the author admitted it was made up.
Here's the one about the Democrats not having an American flag at the first day of the DNC.
After being busted stealing a pic from another website from the second day (a page that fact checked the claim as true), the question was changed to whether the American flag was "banned" from the convention, which was never the claim.
You need to be more specific with your criticisms and provide some support for the "after being busted stealing" part. For one, that has no bearing or relevance on whether the claim is true or not. Secondly, whether they were "banned" or not is irrelevant as the actual claim is shown, in full, right on the page. Whether the claim is "banned" or whether it was that the "DNC announced the flag may not be worn or waved" matters little if both claims are objectively false.
If they plagiarized the image from a website with a caption saying "day 2", and Snopes claims it's from "day 1", that has no bearing on their credibility? The pic was from cspan, via a media matters story from day 2 that was pulled after all the attention.
That's at least 3 degrees of dishonesty, from a website who depends on it's reputation.
Here's the original claim:
That same day, Snopes writer Dan Evon wrote a “fact-check” article declaring it “false” that: “No American flags were on display in stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.” (posted on day one)
The whole point is they changed the question to fit the answer they wanted.
If it changes the context or response to the claim, then yes it does. In this case, whether it's from Day 1 or Day 2 is irrelevant as the original claim doesn't make a distinction between the days. It simply says that the flags weren't allowed at the convention which is objectively false.
Even if I assume that this statement is true - (“No American flags were on display in stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.” (posted on day one)) - the claim is still 100% false as there is video evidence that shows that the screens did in fact show American flags on both Day 1 and Day 2.
>That's at least 3 degrees of dishonesty, from a website who depends on it's reputation.
Your links, claims, and responses don't support any kind of assertion of dishonesty. They may have made a mistake in captioning a Day 2 image as Day 1 but nothing suggests, at all, that this was anything more than a mistake as opposed to something that was intentionally malicious.
Additionally, after seeing the rest of your responses, I don't think you're arguing this in good faith at all. You have yet to provide any kind of evidence that changes were made to re-frame the articles.
> If it changes the context or response to the claim, then yes it does. In this case, whether it's from Day 1 or Day 2 is irrelevant as the original claim doesn't make a distinction between the days. It simply says that the flags weren't allowed at the convention which is objectively false.
The point is that that wasn't the original claim - the original claim was that there wasn't a flag present, and then snopes changed it to something similar but false to get the desired result.
If I'm understanding this comment chain correctly, of course.
Exactly. And there was originally no specific day mentioned, because the original claim was made on and about day one, which at the time, was the only day.
>The point is that that wasn't the original claim - the original claim was that there wasn't a flag present, and then snopes changed it to something similar but false to get the desired result.
That's what I said in my response, though. Even if the original claim was that "there wasn't a flag present", that claim is still false as there is demonstrable proof that shows there were plenty of flags present on both Day 1 and Day 2. Even if the original claim was "flags were banned" or "flags were banned on Day 1", it doesn't change the fact that the piece would still be labelled as "False".
If people are claiming that Snopes is changing either the claims or the content to get a desired result, they need to show some kind of evidence for that. The only thing that they've shown is that Snopes has changed the claim despite the fact that the result is still the same. They're attributing editorial changes to malice rather than clarity.
To be clear, if the claim was originally "Flags were banned" and they changed it to "Flags were banned for Day 1" because it lets them call it false, that might be cause for a call of malice. The evidence, though, shows that any variation of "flags were banned" or "flags weren't present" is not true because there are photos and videos that clearly show they were present for both Day 1 and Day 2. Any change from either of those headings to the current heading would still be 100% accurate as far as the assessment is concerned.
The only flag ever on stage day 1 was the color guard, who left with it.
Other pictures from "day one" are actually from day 2. Even politifact admitted that they were over compensating on day 2 after Trump called them out on Twitter the evening of day 1.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?".
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.
Then something has gone horribly wrong, either in the nature (or its expression) of human beings or in your estimation of human beings.
If you are indeed right then the entire rational framework supporting the very notion of a functional democratic society of free men and women, which assumes that humans are rational animals capable of making moral judgements and deciding between right and wrong as an evolutionary strategy, is forfeit.
I'm not totally disagreeing with you, but I would be more interested in solving the original problem that makes this true, which in my view would represent a corruption of a human's natural abilities.
These types of issues expose a problem that needs to be solved elsewhere, so in that sense it is useful not to nerf the entire information world of all potential confusion.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Snopes has been used against right wing sites and in favour of left wing controversies. For example, they labelled a clearly satire site Babylon Bee as "fake news". Downplaying Antifa violence. And outright lying about a woman being punched in the face who was throwing glass bottles. I'm pretty sure there are more cases but those come up with a quick search.
Note: I'm not from USA/UK, not white, not right wing, I think Trump is unqualified to say the least. But Snopes, like many other sites, is no longer unbiased or objective. So long.
In only a few places it's marked as Satire. They publish a very agenda driven news that's taken literally very commonly, unlike the Onion which is well known to be satire and does not have an overt extreme bias.
It's a very good call to call it fake news since mainstream social media is taking it for real.
I spent about five minutes reading the discussion at your r/JordanPeterson link. While I see the link has spurred some substantive discussion stemming from the "ha ha only serious" Babylon Bee article, I'm not seeing anyone confused that this is real news.
Doesn't seem to be unlike HN where we basically just kneejerk respond to titles and titles are more like open-ended writing prompts for us that mainly have the purpose of introducing a topic like "javascript sucks" or "weight loss is just CICO" or whichever hobby horses we have chomping at the bit.
Babylon Bee is also well known to be satire. I would also say it doesn't have an "extreme" bias. It's about as far right of center as the Onion is far left, which is to say some, but not particularly extreme.
> Clearly many right and alt right subreddits are taking stories from there seriously, including r/conservative.
The entire subreddit r/atetheonion is dedicated to people believing Onion articles. Bablylon Bee is not unique in this regard.
I think this is the bias people are generally referring to here. The Babylon Bee isn't extreme in its partisan leaning, and is a popular satirical site. But because that lean is right, rather than left, it gets painted as more extreme, or people feel that there is some kind of more pressing need to label it as satire.
It indicates that the "fact checkers" may be in a bubble of their own and are failing to account for their biases appropriately.
Well it looks interesting, but the intro video states that it is, "The only platform designed specifically for rational debates." This is not true; HN is an example of another forum with such a purpose. Others exist, though they periodically get "Eternal September'ed" once enough people join and have to be abandoned.
Forums are for chronological discussion. New comments bury old comments. People talk past each other or in circles. A platform designed for rational debate puts a statement at the top and collects pro/con arguments under it. You win such a debate by curating a concise list of effective statements, not by talking longer than your opponent can.
Rational debate can happen in a discussion forum, but forums aren't really designed for it.
It'd be an interesting idea. I'm not sure about all of the features needed. I'd add that it'd be helpful to have a place to post sources, possibly with dedicated discussion. Both sides would have a chance to critique each others sources before the debate completes.
On Kialo the sources in the arguments are normally discussed in pros and cons underneath the argument they are in, or in the comments of a claim, sort of a meta discussion where folks discuss how to best formulate a claim. Some of their argument trees nest 10 levels deep.
I am actually not sure I would call Kialo debates, debates, they seem to me more like argument maps, coupled with Wikipedia. Also, they aren't antagonistic and there isn't really a winner.
I have gotten plenty of claims rejected because they were already in the debate.
I think the most important aspect of an ideal platform is that its users are not encouraged to write outrageous statements that then garner the most likes / upvotes, as is often the case on Twitter and Reddit.
At HN I am actually frequently surprised that things stay as civil as they do, though, as you write, they often go round and round and are a bit confusing for readers, which isn't HN's fault but just the nature of threaded commenting forums.
Is it though? My impression of HN is that debate isn't encouraged. Heck, discussion is basically discouraged. HN intentionally makes it more difficult to see if people responded to your comment to prevent people from constantly trying to defend their internet honor. However, back and forth discussion is important for debating ideas. HN guidelines specifically ask readers: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle"
HN seems more geared towards "intellectual curiosity" and the discovery of new ideas. It doesn't seem tailor-made for rational debates, or specifically designed with debate in mind. I've yet to see a platform that attempts it (haven't looked into the posted site either).
I've found them to have a consistent bias, often claiming things are "partially true" when they conflict with the site's overall left-leaning narrative. I noticed this during the 2016 election, so that may have changed.
I hadn't heard about this, and there's nothing in the main article posted about the origins. I went to their gofundme and read a bunch of updates, and was able to find this article. Seems to stem from an alleged breach of contract. As an anonymous internet commentator and IAAL, I will say that a skim of the complaints and various actions leads me to believe that Salon group is acting in bad faith, and the various courts who have ruled agree with that view. Poor Snopes. :(
The relationship between the two companies stretches back to the fall of 2015, when Bardav founder David Mikkelson inked a deal with Proper Media to manage all content and advertising accounts for Snopes, according to the complaint. Mikkelson terminated that agreement in spring 2017, according to the document.
“Our termination of the contract was fully in accord with the cancellation provisions of that contract,” he told Poynter in an email. “The contract was terminated because it was highly disadvantageous to us.”
A month after Proper Media filed its legal complaint, Bardav filed a cross-complaint in the Superior Court of California in San Diego County alleging four claims, including breach of contract.
“Proper Media failed to perform its contractual and legal obligations, and Bardav eventually terminated the contract in accordance with its terms,” the document reads. “Proper Media is now wrongfully withholding money owed to Bardav and effectively holding the Snopes.com website hostage by preventing Bardav from moving the website, advertising and other back-end functions to another service provider.”
Bardav signed over a share of Snopes’ revenue to Proper Media in exchange for web services such as management of its back-end advertising platform, according to the cross-complaint. Proper Media alleges in its original complaint, which was filed in early May, that it still has a valid, written contract that the company upheld until Bardav withheld the “accounts, tools and data” it needed to manage Snopes’ operations. The complaint alleges that Mikkelson himself breached the agreement by canceling it.
That's great context. Thanks for the response. Very helpful in understanding what's going on since Snopes seems reluctant to offer more detail on it, understandably.
It could be, it's hard to rule out that but the parties are both owners which feels like an odd occurrence for a SLAPP suit. It makes sense as a contract dispute but not much as a SLAPP suit.
If it is a SLAPP suit what are the advertisers for Snopes trying to prevent Snopes from publishing?
Does it though? Is there any evidence you have that this suite is being brought in order prevent public participation from snopes? The suite seems to be entirely about who is contractually owed the profits from advertising. This may be an abuse of the system but its not a SLAPP.
Well, for one Snopes filed an anti slapp motion and the court fully granted it. If that's not evidence this is slapp, I don't know what is.
"As part of our defense, Snopes and our CEO David Mikkelson filed separate anti-SLAPP motions against Proper Media, Richmond, and Schoentrup. Those motions were heard in August 2019, and they were both granted in their entirety, with the court striking claims related to defamation and the advancement of legal fees against both Snopes and Mr. Mikkelson."
Since Snopes has already won an "anti-SLAPP" legal motion against Proper Media's defamation case against Snopes, I'd say that's evidence that Proper Media is abusing the system in a way that's subject to anti-SLAPP statutes.
>Snopes filed an anti-SLAPP motion against Proper Media, Schoentrup, and Richmond, and as expected, the Snopes fact-checkers prevailed. The court held that the statements in question were true, were not defamatory, and/or were published outside the one-year statute of limitations, and therefore struck down the claims brought against Snopes based on those allegedly defamatory statements.
Ironically, here's a Salon article about SLAPP lawsuits:
Real free speech threat isn't on campus: Rich use courts to silence foes.
How the wealthy use frivolous lawsuits to silence activists, journalists and even victims of sexual violence.
AMANDA MARCOTTE.
SEPTEMBER 12, 2018.
It was a successful "legal motion" "TO STRIKE PLAINTIFFS’ THIRD AMENDED COMPLAINT" from Proper Media's defamation case, not a "suite" (sic) nor a "separate lawsuit" as you claim.
You could try reading the document I linked to. It's all there in stark black and white:
"By cutting off Snopes’ primary source of revenue and stymying its ability to pay legal fees, Plaintiffs hoped they could bring Snopes to its knees." ... "Plaintiffs’ claims are exactly what California’s anti-SLAPP statute is designed to prevent. This motion is proper because the challenged claims are a calculated effort by Plaintiffs to
obtain an economic advantage over Snopes by expanding the scope of litigation, driving up legal costs, and chilling Snopes’ fundraising efforts."
You said "The suite seems to be entirely about who is contractually owed the profits from advertising."
It states quite clearly and addresses your point that that those profits from advertising were Snopes' primary source of revenue, which they used to pay their legal fees. Which is why they they won the anti-SLAPP motion.
The word "covered" doesn't quite capture the amount of spectacular production, dancing, singing, and cussing that went into John Oliver's elaborate exposition.
This article is very light on details. Apparently, this lawsuit has its source in the divorce between David and Barbara Mikkelsen, the two founders of Snopes. Barbara sold her shares to a couple of people who also owned the company that handled advertising for Snopes. That company, Proper Media, at some point withheld ad revenue from Snopes which nearly killed Snopes[0]. Now they have acquired Salon, and this article makes it sound like they're using Salon's resources to continue the legal battle, but I have no idea if that's the case.
It would have been nice if Snopes of all sites had provided a bit more background on this, though I suppose they can never be considered impartial on their own legal struggles, so perhaps they're right to keep this brief.
Was it largely Barbara's project? That makes the change of ownership a lot more accurate, since she's not owning any of it now. I got the impression David considered it mostly his, but that disagreement might well be the reason for the messy divorce.
I clearly don't know enough about the background to make any call on who's right and who's wrong here.
David started the site based on his postings to alt.folklore.urban, but as I recall most of the Snopes articles on the site back in the day had Barbara's signature on them. So even if David thought of it as his and ran the operations, Barbara provided most if the content and set the tone.
They divorced because David was having affairs with multiple women, ostensibly even using Snopes money for prostitutes. Of course even if not the primary cause of the divorce, a husband-and-wife business is going to make the divorce messier.
It's possible that, because the litigation in ongoing, Snopes is avoiding talking about the details of the case itself as most counsel seems to advise.
So, essentially, they are asking the readers to finance the founders' bad divorce fallout? And present it as a First Amendment issue? Nice move for a respected fact checker and truth gatekeeper.
Snopes, from my memory, was the original place to point people who email-forwarded old wives tales and other such junk that would otherwise spread uncorrected. Hang in there Snopes!
I remember after a few months of being forwarded on stupid urban legend email chains by my mom, I started replying all on her messages with links to snopes.
Did that stop her from sending around stupid emails without verifying them? No, but it did stop her from forwarding them to _me_, which is I guess a kind of victory.
For all the sanity snopes has brought to the internet I’m surprised it’s been so long and I never have donated to them. I dropped $50. Thanks for the good advice :)
Are you making a moral judgement, or something else?
I don't usually get a say in what happens to my money once it leaves my pocket, I also apparently don't have the information you have, but if I did, I'm not sure it would change my decision.
Is the current Snopes team known for their purchasing of hookers? That's also totally legal in lots of places, again, not that I care.
If the company money becomes part of the individual's compensation, I don't see how it matters.
Also, this sounds super speculative. As far as I can tell David Mikkelson has been accused of these things, by his former wife. They may be true, but I don't have any evidence of that, I'm especially sensitive to the fact that in a situation like a messy divorce, lots of bad things start flying around.
I couldn't find any of this coming to a legal conclusion that indicates the above accusations were true. It seems like it would be easy to show if he used company funds for personal trips, etc... the cheating/prostitute purchases probably harder to prove.
I'd be curious to know how you buy anything if you can't spend money at places where adulterers work. I acknowledge that's kind of a sarcastic question, but it seems like you have more of a problem with Snopes than the owner, which is fair (but I acknowledge I'm putting words into your mouth and don't intend to walk away from this believing my assumption).
At this point, this is throwing good money after bad. The damage has been done to their credibility, and it would take drastic action to be a credible arbiter of reality once more.
It's not a lie. We know for a fact that journalists coordinate to push propaganda and influence political outcomes. The most famous instance was probably JournoList.
a secret, private web message board open only to left-wing members of the news media
>their opinions
opinions which include openly plotting to make sure that negative coverage of Barack Obama was either explained away or, better yet, ignored by the media.
>I clutch my pearls.
This collusion showed that “the fix was in” and that liberal “journalists” saw no reason not to coordinate along ideological lines instead of simply reporting the truth.
>Next you'll tell me newsrooms use slack.
Next you'll tell me journalists aren't expected to simply report the truth.
Honestly, I really don't care if sites like Snopes or Wikipedia shut down or disappear. While I appreciate what they provide and what they at least claim to provide, no one should be considered the gate-keepers of all that is not "fake news". BTW I did donate to Wikipedia this year...
They both do a very poor job at that to be fair. Wikipedia will willingly allow editors to ignore actual facts in favor of a blogpost who wrote about the same event second or third-hand, and Snopes has no credibility at all, full stop.
I find your argument a bit cynical at best - this is a very black or white way of viewing two very large sites. Having read through Wikipedia decisions they are often open about the process, and the decisions can be very nuanced, they'll never be 100% successful, but they work extremely hard at trying to avoid bias and mistakes. I find Snopes to be a reasonable resource too, they present sourced facts as much as possible and whether or not I agree with all their conclusions I find the way they go about their research very compelling.
Wikipedia, in a random sampling of information, came in as equally or more reliable than nearly any other privately published reference. It's not perfect but it doesn't have to be.
They present their INTERPRETATION of the facts. For example some may call ANTIFA as a force for good and others as a terrorist organization. Snopes themselves have a pretty clear slant/agenda.
Why? Buzzfeed and Buzzfeed News are two distinct entities and the News side has a great track record. I don't think that comparing it to Salon is really saying anything at all.
I have kind of soured on snopes since the 2016 election. Their political fact-checking includes a heavy dose of spin, framing issues with certain wording so that they can say "mostly false" with a big red X on their own strawman, so that you have to read between the lines to realize that what's true is actually the crux of the matter.
Snopes used to strictly be a site you linked someone to disprove urban legends, and that good reputation is now being wielded in a partisan political battle
They haven't said anything untruthful here. But imagine the site were run by republicans - the framing would be different. The claim would be "5 of 6" instead of "every", allowing them to print a big green checkmark graphic, and supporting details for each attempt
I don't understand. The graphic included in that article shows the claim which is that Democrats have filed for impeachment for every Republican President. That's not a factual or accurate claim. If the claim was different then of course the result would be different. If anything, I think this favors the opposite of what you're saying since not only do they have varying degrees of truth (as opposed to simply saying "This is a lie") and they provide both a description of why they say it's "Mostly False" and sources for each claim.
It's not perfect but this doesn't seem like a good example of bias or "framing" like you claim.
That is complete and utter nonsense. The version of the claim that's being fact-checked is the one that's shown in the article. Again, unless you have some evidence to suggest that that's been changed nefariously, your criticism is completely without merit.
They're literally responding to a republican meme that phrases the question exactly that way?
The meme itself is posted in that page.
I think you might be projecting.
To me there's not such a big difference between resorting to a totally original straw man and picking the weakest argument among those different individuals on the other side of party lines have put forward. This snopes article serves as a catchall for claims about democratic attempts to impeach. There's no separate article for a different wording of the meme.
And even if this were the only way anyone had worded the claim, it still merits a "partially true" or "mostly true".
I deliberately avoided putting specific examples in my first post because I didn't want to quibble over the specifics. Spin is spin, it's not outright lying. Snopes isn't going to bend the truth to such a degree that a democrat, when confronted with the article, would be forced to admit they are dirty rotten liars.
>And even if this were the only way anyone had worded the claim, it still merits a "partially true" or "mostly true".
How so? At best, only 2 of the last 6 Presidents were actually called for impeachment by the Democratic party and, at worst, it was 3 if you count Nixon which was bi-partisan. How does that make the claim, in any way, "mostly true" or even "partially true"?
Yes, maybe we have seen the same articles by them.
The headlines will say "X is FALSE" implying that a claim is unilaterally false, while one can see in the article's text that it's actually half-true, even more than half-true in some cases.
And then their obnoxious habit of "fact checking" satirical publications (which they tried to pass on as actual fact check, but after being called on it resorted by just putting a label "yes, it's satire" and pretending they are doing valuable service by that).
That's not at all what the article states and you stating that in your response puts into question the rest of it.
Edit: After reading the other article too, I can't see what your complaint here is. The claim is unproven and the article expounds on exactly why they made that assessment.
The claim does not have any evidence for it whatsoever. However, instead of stating it as a fact, Snopes starts to editorialize about "deeper truth" in it, which it doesn't do in other cases where claim is presented without ay evidence. The fact check would be "false" or at least "unproven" (if Snopes would be consistent assigning "unproven" to every claim having no evidence behind it) and leave editorializing to non-fact-checkers.
>The fact check would be "false" or at least "unproven"
It's listed as "unproven" so I don't see what your complaint is. They acknowledge that the specific claim has no evidence behind it but that there are, in fact, other claims that have been similarly made that do have truth to them. "False" is not the same thing as "unproven" and there's nothing that definitively proves the claim as false while, at the same time, there is evidence for other similar claims.
Your responses suggest that you're not evaluating this in good faith.
> It's listed as "unproven" so I don't see what your complaint is
My complaint is that very frequently Snopes lists claims without proof as false. And does not editorialize about why it might be "deeper truth". But in this case, it lists the claim as "unproven" (implying it might be true, just lacking proof, despite no indication of such proof might ever be found) and does editorialize.
For example, here's "false" rating: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-veteran-service-dog/ (chosen randomly - first "false" story I encountered on the site).
Approached with the same criteria as above, we could say that it's merely "unproven", since while we don't have a proof Trump ever evicted a veteran, he owns real estate, so he certainly could have. We could even editorialize about "deeper truth" in this claim, in the same vein - that not finding it in this case doesn't mean Trump couldn't have done in in other cases, and he did many other bad things, etc. But in this case Snopes correctly chose to not do it, stick to the facts and label it as "false". In the case above, regrettably, they did not.
>Approached with the same criteria as above, we could say that it's merely "unproven"
Except it's very clearly not. There is direct evidence towards the contrary. The claim in question is from a tweet that's cited directly at the beginning of the article that makes a claim that Trump did something that he did not do. It's not "unproven", it's literally "false" because Trump had nothing to do with it other than having his name on the property of the incident in question.
This isn't some tenuous historical claim where the evidence has been lost and the fact that you can't see that means you either lack the ability to determine nuance or you're being intentionally dishonest and this was the best you could do or you couldn't find anything more concrete so you're hiding behind "chosen randomly".
If you have a claim that Snopes is incorrectly listing claims without proof as false, then post them. If they're as frequent as you claim, you shouldn't have to resort to a random post. You would have an example at the ready. I suspect that you realize your argument holds no merit and that's why you can't provide an example. Otherwise, I see no reason why you shouldn't easily be able to show something that you claim is "very frequent".
If they stayed with urban legends and non-political hoaxes, they'd probably be now an example of rare trustworthy factchecking site without a political spin. But getting into politics was too juicy a piece of traffic to resist. So now they're just one of the pack.
Can't say I have much confidence in Snopes. Over the years, I have seen at least a few Snopes articles on topics beginning with "FALSE" which then go on to list several facts supporting the notion that the claim actually is true, but then defer the final word to so-called experts, who arguably have a conflict of interest in said matters.
I love Snopes, but this is one of the worst expositions I've ever seen because it assumes that the reader is already familiar with the situation. The first sentence is:
> We wish we had better news, but they have filed another appeal.
Who is "they"? Appeal of what? There isn't even a link to any background material so that someone who wants to come up to speed can. If you're not already in the know, you're out of luck. This is absolutely shocking for a site whose entire raison d'etre is to combat misinformation.
It pains me to say this, but if this is what Snopes has come to I have to wonder if they still deserve suppport.
244 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadHow so?
>More troubling is that we simply don’t know who contributed to a given fact check. David noted that Snopes’ “process is a highly collaborative one in which several different people may contribute to a single article,” but that “the result is typically credited to whoever wrote the initial draft.” David did not respond to a request for comment on why Snopes only lists a single author for each of its fact checks, rather than provide an acknowledgement section that lists all of the individuals who contributed to a given fact check.
It's the same problem Wikipedia sometimes has. Selectively pick sources that confirm the story you want to convey, and ignore the others.
The other big problem recently is to spin something that's true as being false, by slightly changing the question, to be broad enough to encompass an "out."
Also this story covers most of the history of what's in the linked article, from over 3 years ago.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...
Do you have an example of this?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/10/...
The claim is correct, and the article even acknowledges that. They then throw in a bit about "negative wealth" amongst the world's poor and somehow award it "Three Pinocchios" as a result.
Since there were 33 x's, and that many Republicans had been voted out of Congress, they said true.
But in the original picture, many of the X's were reelected, and many weren't even in Congress to begin with.
The author has since retracted the tweet, and admitted it was fake. But Snopes just rephrased the question and left it as true.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gop-obamacare-repeal-elect...
That is not at all what the article you linked states. Not only does the article confirm that some of the X's in the picture were not in Congress but it provides a specific list that shows that, for those who were, the claim is accurate.
The original claim was those specific people were voted out of Congress. Not that it's representative of the general quantity.
The claim in the title that they edited might be true, but the original claim from Twitter is not. That's the whole point. From the article:
>this one got the general idea and numbers correct (even if the persons actually pictured in the accompanying photograph are difficult or impossible to identify).
Difficult or impossible to identify? Dozens of others have done it, and even the author admitted it was made up.
After being busted stealing a pic from another website from the second day (a page that fact checked the claim as true), the question was changed to whether the American flag was "banned" from the convention, which was never the claim.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/flags-banned-at-dnc/
That's at least 3 degrees of dishonesty, from a website who depends on it's reputation.
Here's the original claim:
That same day, Snopes writer Dan Evon wrote a “fact-check” article declaring it “false” that: “No American flags were on display in stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.” (posted on day one)
The whole point is they changed the question to fit the answer they wanted.
If it changes the context or response to the claim, then yes it does. In this case, whether it's from Day 1 or Day 2 is irrelevant as the original claim doesn't make a distinction between the days. It simply says that the flags weren't allowed at the convention which is objectively false.
Even if I assume that this statement is true - (“No American flags were on display in stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.” (posted on day one)) - the claim is still 100% false as there is video evidence that shows that the screens did in fact show American flags on both Day 1 and Day 2.
>That's at least 3 degrees of dishonesty, from a website who depends on it's reputation.
Your links, claims, and responses don't support any kind of assertion of dishonesty. They may have made a mistake in captioning a Day 2 image as Day 1 but nothing suggests, at all, that this was anything more than a mistake as opposed to something that was intentionally malicious.
Additionally, after seeing the rest of your responses, I don't think you're arguing this in good faith at all. You have yet to provide any kind of evidence that changes were made to re-frame the articles.
The point is that that wasn't the original claim - the original claim was that there wasn't a flag present, and then snopes changed it to something similar but false to get the desired result.
If I'm understanding this comment chain correctly, of course.
That's what I said in my response, though. Even if the original claim was that "there wasn't a flag present", that claim is still false as there is demonstrable proof that shows there were plenty of flags present on both Day 1 and Day 2. Even if the original claim was "flags were banned" or "flags were banned on Day 1", it doesn't change the fact that the piece would still be labelled as "False".
If people are claiming that Snopes is changing either the claims or the content to get a desired result, they need to show some kind of evidence for that. The only thing that they've shown is that Snopes has changed the claim despite the fact that the result is still the same. They're attributing editorial changes to malice rather than clarity.
To be clear, if the claim was originally "Flags were banned" and they changed it to "Flags were banned for Day 1" because it lets them call it false, that might be cause for a call of malice. The evidence, though, shows that any variation of "flags were banned" or "flags weren't present" is not true because there are photos and videos that clearly show they were present for both Day 1 and Day 2. Any change from either of those headings to the current heading would still be 100% accurate as far as the assessment is concerned.
The only flag ever on stage day 1 was the color guard, who left with it.
Other pictures from "day one" are actually from day 2. Even politifact admitted that they were over compensating on day 2 after Trump called them out on Twitter the evening of day 1.
There are literally videos of the entirety of Day 1 that show several American flags and people in the audience with flag paraphernalia.
Being willfully ignorant is not an excuse here.
They were added the next day, after being called out.
Also, snopes is not an innocent reference site. Their “debunking” of satire like Babylonbee can cause those sites to be deplatformed.
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.
This is not, in anyway, a reasonable filter for bias, let alone one for satire.
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.
Facebook and Google can pound sand.
I used to rely on them, too. That's part of the reason that it pisses me off so much... It used to be a great resource.
Now I use it more to see how a political claim is going to spun, than to check whether it's true.
It only looks like they're being partisan if you cherry-pick your articles.
It's the equivalent of claiming to have a black friend as proof you're not racist.
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?
Just covering an opposing viewpoint doesn't mean it's covered in a neutral way.
According to their site it's 5 out of 6 presidents, or roughly 80%. Their rating: mostly false. Looks mostly true to me.
1. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dems-impeach-gop-president...
An actual Congressional representative fell for an Onion article titled "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex".
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republican-congressman-falls-vi...
> "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."
Maybe because a false rating leads to being buried by Google and Facebook. That's a legitimate motive.
Asking for someone or something to be investigated isn't necessarily a de-facto innocence excuse.
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.
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.
There are plenty of people who don't find the onion, at all. It's not a justification for blacklisting them as fake news.
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.
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.
You guys are reaching so hard here.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
That statement is disturbingly incorrect.
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...
You'll find just as many debunkings of Onion articles, including left-wing satire like "Mike Pence Disappointed God Has Never Asked Him To Kill One Of Own Children". https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mike-pence-laments-no-sacr...
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.
Yeah. It is hilarious. Now they do label it as satire but at that point it was straight faced ”No! CNN has not bought a washing machine”
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.snopes.com/notes/why-we-include-humor-and-satire...
Articles from sites like Babylon Bee -- hell, even from The Onion, in more than one case -- get stripped of context, quoted, slapped on meme GIFs, and traded around by folks who don't know (or sometimes don't care) about the source. Another quote from the linked article:
If Clickhole (an offshoot of the Onion humor/satire site) publishes a new article, and within a day 1,200 different people have queried us to ask if that article is “true,” then clearly Clickhole isn’t well known to those 1,200 people. They, and others like them, are the audience we’re attempting to reach and inform that Clickhole is a humor site — not, obviously, the many people who follow Clickhole and therefore know that the site’s material is not intended to be factual.
In our current highly-politicized environment, there's a subset -- and not an insignificant one -- of the population which is very ready to believe the worst about "The Other Side". The web site The Conversation surveyed over 800 people to ask about the most shared fake political stories on social media during a two-week period, and The Babylon Bee came up in their results:
"Members of both parties failed to recognize that The Babylon Bee is satire, but Republicans were considerably more likely to do so. Of the 23 falsehoods that came from The Bee, eight were confidently believed by at least 15% of Republican respondents."
https://theconversation.com/too-many-people-think-satirical-...
I'm not suggesting this is a sign that Republicans are more gullible, per se -- I'm suggesting it's a sign that when people are fed satire that plays into their biases and that satire is played with an Onion-style perfectly straight face, more people than you think believe it. That means there's going to be way more than you think who say, "Hey, is that true?"... and go to snopes.com to find out.
Even, yes, if the quote is from The Babylon Bee.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
"Trump says Republicans should release their own transcripts in impeachment probe"
You think that's satire? Here's the news article:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/468788-trump-say...
Not a line in there to suggest this is nonsense (which it is), here it is directly from the Ass's mouth:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11938962750931845...
Parody account? It has 'real' in it... You be the judge.
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.
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.
Pot, meet kettle.
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.)
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.
Instead of dealing with negative post-impeachment fallout, and potentially ending up in a worse place on the eve of next years election, politically?
Also genuinely curious if you've watched hearings this week, and if it's affected your opinion of Schiff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The requests to fact-check that article on the Snopes forums beg to differ with this assessment.
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?".
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060523072353.h...
Careful with that word "gullible" - I do not think it means what you think it means.
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.
Of course, we're not the first ones to be having this conversation. Here's Snopes themselves commenting on the phenomenon: https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/16/readers-think-satire-...
and here it is being described in the mass media: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/us/snopes-babylon-bee.htm...
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.
Correction, you can. But unfortunately not everybody can.
If you are indeed right then the entire rational framework supporting the very notion of a functional democratic society of free men and women, which assumes that humans are rational animals capable of making moral judgements and deciding between right and wrong as an evolutionary strategy, is forfeit.
I'm not totally disagreeing with you, but I would be more interested in solving the original problem that makes this true, which in my view would represent a corruption of a human's natural abilities.
These types of issues expose a problem that needs to be solved elsewhere, so in that sense it is useful not to nerf the entire information world of all potential confusion.
1) whether content should be judged on it's intended vs perceived meaning
2) whether we should make an effort to reduce everything to be understandable to the lowest common denominator.
Why's that? You don't think there's value to debunking that kind of information if people think it's "real"?
That depends on who they turn the reins over to. One of the founders is still in control of the site.
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.
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.
Even though the Democrats have tried to impeach 5 out of 6 presidents, this was labelled as "Mostly False".
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dems-impeach-gop-president...
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.
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.
In this case, the original claim could have been "most" or "5 out of 6", and changing it to "all" is an easy way to post that big red x.
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.
For actual cases I've already posted:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516623
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516762
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.
I wonder why a trusted, transparent site would do that...
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?
> This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/snopes.com
The Wayback Machine only excludes sites upon request.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/*
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.
https://foodbabe.com/do-you-trust-snopes-you-wont-after-read...
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.
That's not as much of an issue anymore, since they just change the question from the start now.
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."
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.
Note: I'm not from USA/UK, not white, not right wing, I think Trump is unqualified to say the least. But Snopes, like many other sites, is no longer unbiased or objective. So long.
Clearly many right and alt right subreddits are taking stories from there seriously, including r/conservative.
https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/duy4x5/nazi...
Look at the comments there.
In only a few places it's marked as Satire. They publish a very agenda driven news that's taken literally very commonly, unlike the Onion which is well known to be satire and does not have an overt extreme bias.
It's a very good call to call it fake news since mainstream social media is taking it for real.
> Clearly many right and alt right subreddits are taking stories from there seriously, including r/conservative.
The entire subreddit r/atetheonion is dedicated to people believing Onion articles. Bablylon Bee is not unique in this regard.
I think this is the bias people are generally referring to here. The Babylon Bee isn't extreme in its partisan leaning, and is a popular satirical site. But because that lean is right, rather than left, it gets painted as more extreme, or people feel that there is some kind of more pressing need to label it as satire.
It indicates that the "fact checkers" may be in a bubble of their own and are failing to account for their biases appropriately.
Rational debate can happen in a discussion forum, but forums aren't really designed for it.
I have gotten plenty of claims rejected because they were already in the debate.
I think the most important aspect of an ideal platform is that its users are not encouraged to write outrageous statements that then garner the most likes / upvotes, as is often the case on Twitter and Reddit.
At HN I am actually frequently surprised that things stay as civil as they do, though, as you write, they often go round and round and are a bit confusing for readers, which isn't HN's fault but just the nature of threaded commenting forums.
HN seems more geared towards "intellectual curiosity" and the discovery of new ideas. It doesn't seem tailor-made for rational debates, or specifically designed with debate in mind. I've yet to see a platform that attempts it (haven't looked into the posted site either).
The complaint:
http://www.poynter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Snopes-COM...
From here:
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2017/snopes-is-locked-...
A snippet:
The relationship between the two companies stretches back to the fall of 2015, when Bardav founder David Mikkelson inked a deal with Proper Media to manage all content and advertising accounts for Snopes, according to the complaint. Mikkelson terminated that agreement in spring 2017, according to the document.
“Our termination of the contract was fully in accord with the cancellation provisions of that contract,” he told Poynter in an email. “The contract was terminated because it was highly disadvantageous to us.”
A month after Proper Media filed its legal complaint, Bardav filed a cross-complaint in the Superior Court of California in San Diego County alleging four claims, including breach of contract.
“Proper Media failed to perform its contractual and legal obligations, and Bardav eventually terminated the contract in accordance with its terms,” the document reads. “Proper Media is now wrongfully withholding money owed to Bardav and effectively holding the Snopes.com website hostage by preventing Bardav from moving the website, advertising and other back-end functions to another service provider.”
Bardav signed over a share of Snopes’ revenue to Proper Media in exchange for web services such as management of its back-end advertising platform, according to the cross-complaint. Proper Media alleges in its original complaint, which was filed in early May, that it still has a valid, written contract that the company upheld until Bardav withheld the “accounts, tools and data” it needed to manage Snopes’ operations. The complaint alleges that Mikkelson himself breached the agreement by canceling it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21514478
If it is a SLAPP suit what are the advertisers for Snopes trying to prevent Snopes from publishing?
"As part of our defense, Snopes and our CEO David Mikkelson filed separate anti-SLAPP motions against Proper Media, Richmond, and Schoentrup. Those motions were heard in August 2019, and they were both granted in their entirety, with the court striking claims related to defamation and the advancement of legal fees against both Snopes and Mr. Mikkelson."
https://www.snopes.com/uploads/2019/06/anti-slapp.pdf
Snopes Prevails in Anti-SLAPP Motion. Truth is "an absolute defense to any libel action." SNOPES STAFF, PUBLISHED 16 AUGUST 2019.
https://www.snopes.com/snopes-anti-slapp-motion/
>Snopes filed an anti-SLAPP motion against Proper Media, Schoentrup, and Richmond, and as expected, the Snopes fact-checkers prevailed. The court held that the statements in question were true, were not defamatory, and/or were published outside the one-year statute of limitations, and therefore struck down the claims brought against Snopes based on those allegedly defamatory statements.
Ironically, here's a Salon article about SLAPP lawsuits:
Real free speech threat isn't on campus: Rich use courts to silence foes. How the wealthy use frivolous lawsuits to silence activists, journalists and even victims of sexual violence. AMANDA MARCOTTE. SEPTEMBER 12, 2018.
https://www.salon.com/2018/09/12/real-free-speech-threat-isn...
You could try reading the document I linked to. It's all there in stark black and white:
"By cutting off Snopes’ primary source of revenue and stymying its ability to pay legal fees, Plaintiffs hoped they could bring Snopes to its knees." ... "Plaintiffs’ claims are exactly what California’s anti-SLAPP statute is designed to prevent. This motion is proper because the challenged claims are a calculated effort by Plaintiffs to obtain an economic advantage over Snopes by expanding the scope of litigation, driving up legal costs, and chilling Snopes’ fundraising efforts."
You said "The suite seems to be entirely about who is contractually owed the profits from advertising."
It states quite clearly and addresses your point that that those profits from advertising were Snopes' primary source of revenue, which they used to pay their legal fees. Which is why they they won the anti-SLAPP motion.
Do you still have any misunderstanding now?
It would have been nice if Snopes of all sites had provided a bit more background on this, though I suppose they can never be considered impartial on their own legal struggles, so perhaps they're right to keep this brief.
[0] https://nypost.com/2019/05/16/salon-media-sold-for-5-million...
I clearly don't know enough about the background to make any call on who's right and who's wrong here.
They divorced because David was having affairs with multiple women, ostensibly even using Snopes money for prostitutes. Of course even if not the primary cause of the divorce, a husband-and-wife business is going to make the divorce messier.
That really reads like a decision just bound to bring up more conflict...
Either way its a heck of a run!
Did that stop her from sending around stupid emails without verifying them? No, but it did stop her from forwarding them to _me_, which is I guess a kind of victory.
I don't usually get a say in what happens to my money once it leaves my pocket, I also apparently don't have the information you have, but if I did, I'm not sure it would change my decision.
Is the current Snopes team known for their purchasing of hookers? That's also totally legal in lots of places, again, not that I care.
What point are you trying to make?
The point I am making is that Snopes was/is horribly mis-managed and should not be given any money. Don't waste your money on fools.
Snopes at its heart is compromised.
Also, this sounds super speculative. As far as I can tell David Mikkelson has been accused of these things, by his former wife. They may be true, but I don't have any evidence of that, I'm especially sensitive to the fact that in a situation like a messy divorce, lots of bad things start flying around.
I couldn't find any of this coming to a legal conclusion that indicates the above accusations were true. It seems like it would be easy to show if he used company funds for personal trips, etc... the cheating/prostitute purchases probably harder to prove.
I'd be curious to know how you buy anything if you can't spend money at places where adulterers work. I acknowledge that's kind of a sarcastic question, but it seems like you have more of a problem with Snopes than the owner, which is fair (but I acknowledge I'm putting words into your mouth and don't intend to walk away from this believing my assumption).
They aren't as depraved as Politifact, at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList
a secret, private web message board open only to left-wing members of the news media
>their opinions
opinions which include openly plotting to make sure that negative coverage of Barack Obama was either explained away or, better yet, ignored by the media.
>I clutch my pearls.
This collusion showed that “the fix was in” and that liberal “journalists” saw no reason not to coordinate along ideological lines instead of simply reporting the truth.
>Next you'll tell me newsrooms use slack.
Next you'll tell me journalists aren't expected to simply report the truth.
What an echo chamber of millennial leftist garbage. I think Buzzfeed news is better journalism than Salon, and thats really saying something.
Why? Buzzfeed and Buzzfeed News are two distinct entities and the News side has a great track record. I don't think that comparing it to Salon is really saying anything at all.
Snopes used to strictly be a site you linked someone to disprove urban legends, and that good reputation is now being wielded in a partisan political battle
I've seen this repeated a few times now. Can you provide an example?
They haven't said anything untruthful here. But imagine the site were run by republicans - the framing would be different. The claim would be "5 of 6" instead of "every", allowing them to print a big green checkmark graphic, and supporting details for each attempt
It's not perfect but this doesn't seem like a good example of bias or "framing" like you claim.
And even if this were the only way anyone had worded the claim, it still merits a "partially true" or "mostly true".
I deliberately avoided putting specific examples in my first post because I didn't want to quibble over the specifics. Spin is spin, it's not outright lying. Snopes isn't going to bend the truth to such a degree that a democrat, when confronted with the article, would be forced to admit they are dirty rotten liars.
How so? At best, only 2 of the last 6 Presidents were actually called for impeachment by the Democratic party and, at worst, it was 3 if you count Nixon which was bi-partisan. How does that make the claim, in any way, "mostly true" or even "partially true"?
And there you have it. I think your objectivity might be a little questionable.
Reality has as known liberal bias.
Snopes has attacked them multiple times saying False. A logical person would not consider satirical being False.
This allows/causes Facebook to delete their content
https://reason.com/video/the-babylon-bee-satirizes-the-absur...
The headlines will say "X is FALSE" implying that a claim is unilaterally false, while one can see in the article's text that it's actually half-true, even more than half-true in some cases.
Or here they are actually declaring facts are not that important, much more important thing is feelings: https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/10/10/facts-and-data-arent-... (yes, I know it's guest article, but they chose to publish it)
And the way to do it? Check out this spectacular "fact check" where they say "lacks concrete evidence but alludes to a deeper truth": https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/colonel-sanders-kfc-miss-c...
And then their obnoxious habit of "fact checking" satirical publications (which they tried to pass on as actual fact check, but after being called on it resorted by just putting a label "yes, it's satire" and pretending they are doing valuable service by that).
Same tactic as NYT publishing so much under "opinion."
That's not at all what the article states and you stating that in your response puts into question the rest of it.
Edit: After reading the other article too, I can't see what your complaint here is. The claim is unproven and the article expounds on exactly why they made that assessment.
It's listed as "unproven" so I don't see what your complaint is. They acknowledge that the specific claim has no evidence behind it but that there are, in fact, other claims that have been similarly made that do have truth to them. "False" is not the same thing as "unproven" and there's nothing that definitively proves the claim as false while, at the same time, there is evidence for other similar claims.
Your responses suggest that you're not evaluating this in good faith.
My complaint is that very frequently Snopes lists claims without proof as false. And does not editorialize about why it might be "deeper truth". But in this case, it lists the claim as "unproven" (implying it might be true, just lacking proof, despite no indication of such proof might ever be found) and does editorialize.
For example, here's "false" rating: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-veteran-service-dog/ (chosen randomly - first "false" story I encountered on the site). Approached with the same criteria as above, we could say that it's merely "unproven", since while we don't have a proof Trump ever evicted a veteran, he owns real estate, so he certainly could have. We could even editorialize about "deeper truth" in this claim, in the same vein - that not finding it in this case doesn't mean Trump couldn't have done in in other cases, and he did many other bad things, etc. But in this case Snopes correctly chose to not do it, stick to the facts and label it as "false". In the case above, regrettably, they did not.
Except it's very clearly not. There is direct evidence towards the contrary. The claim in question is from a tweet that's cited directly at the beginning of the article that makes a claim that Trump did something that he did not do. It's not "unproven", it's literally "false" because Trump had nothing to do with it other than having his name on the property of the incident in question.
This isn't some tenuous historical claim where the evidence has been lost and the fact that you can't see that means you either lack the ability to determine nuance or you're being intentionally dishonest and this was the best you could do or you couldn't find anything more concrete so you're hiding behind "chosen randomly".
If you have a claim that Snopes is incorrectly listing claims without proof as false, then post them. If they're as frequent as you claim, you shouldn't have to resort to a random post. You would have an example at the ready. I suspect that you realize your argument holds no merit and that's why you can't provide an example. Otherwise, I see no reason why you shouldn't easily be able to show something that you claim is "very frequent".
> We wish we had better news, but they have filed another appeal.
Who is "they"? Appeal of what? There isn't even a link to any background material so that someone who wants to come up to speed can. If you're not already in the know, you're out of luck. This is absolutely shocking for a site whose entire raison d'etre is to combat misinformation.
It pains me to say this, but if this is what Snopes has come to I have to wonder if they still deserve suppport.