Lots of folks get confused about satire sites. It is a positive development if you can find another site on the internet that says "even if this is satire, this is why they are wrong".
It was likely a targeted campaign to cut off the Babylon Bee's traffic source. The Bee had been targeting the Snopes brand for a while with headlines like, "Snopes Issues Pre-Approval Of All Statements Made During Tonight's Democratic Debate."
Facebook contracted with Snopes to fact check the news. Snopes knew that if they kept labeling obvious satire as false, The Bee would be more difficult to share on Facebook and potentially banned.
This happened, but Facebook realized the error and no longer uses Snopes for fact-checking.
I don't know how long they have been doing this for, but the two Snopes articles that this article links to use the rating "Labeled Satire", which seems accurate.
Or perhaps they changed their minds once they realized the error? Just because something seems obvious to you doesn't mean it must seem obvious to anyone else. When friends of friends on my social media networks started posting links to their articles (without any context) I certainly got caught "refuting" more than a few of them in the comments until someone pointed this out to me.
> Or perhaps they changed their minds once they realized the error?
if you can't trust fact-checkers to check their facts, then what purpose do they serve? if some rando on twitter or whatever tries to "fact check" the Bee and doesn't see it as satire, then gets called out on it and modifies their statement, then who cares... but if the whole point of your business is to check facts, and is touted as such to the point where major social media sites and search engines directly cite your fact-checkings in a UI-integrated way, then, well...
They "realized the error" after the Babylon Bee put out a press release stating, "While we wish it wasn't necessary, we have retained a law firm to represent us in this matter".
Organizations have more credibility when they realize their errors before the lawyers get involved.
> Marchionni is reevaluating decisions Mikkelson made years earlier to not allow Snopes stories to be archived on the Wayback Machine and is empowered to make any changes necessary.
Not the most immediate important thing, but hiding content from the Wayback Machine that is purported to be factual record is very problematic, to say the least
Honestly I can almost imagine a way to arrive at this conclusion without it being shifty (although no idea what the case actually is here).
If you're going to debunk an article about something like a lack of vaccine safety and need to retract a couple of sentences later, but the overall conclusion is the same, then the conspiracists will be right on you with a diff of the changes from the archive trying to piece together what it all means and who paid you off.
Then one can update to provide a prominent note of clarification, rather than rewriting history. This deprives conspiracists of the ability to go "See, they rewrite history" while providing the full story, warts and all.
Putting the concern of those who may misinterpret the changes above the goal of the truth, is also known as deception.
Encyclopedias stand the test of time with addendums, to facilitate corrections. Removing the transparency merely allows for cyclical references in the news.
You can print a retraction if you need to. Nothing wrong with fessing up and saying “we made a mistake, here’s the correction”, and reputable newspapers/news sites do this as a matter of course. Conspiracy nuts are going to do their own thing no matter what you do or say and if they’re determined enough, will have their own record, so you can only act in good faith for people who are willing to look at you and receive what you say in good faith.
>Nothing wrong with fessing up and saying “we made a mistake, here’s the correction”
Sadly if you do retractions, you are not qualified for the name "fact checker". Because "facts" are not retractable.
And fact-checkers are just the tip of the iceberg, and if you care to look, there are many things that are peddled as being "fact" when there is not enough credible evidence to say so..
For example the statement "Vaccines don't cause autism". Any one with two brain cells will know that this NOT a fact, simply because it does not say "Which vaccines".
But that does not prevent people from saying that as a FACT.
You’ve touched on a basic problem with claiming to be a fact checker where it intersects with science, because “fact checking” is a journalistic tool decent for checking he said/she said BS, but science is an ongoing and continuous process that has its own form of review not assisted by the fact (fact check this!) that most science reporting is crap.
That said, fact checks are typically written by journalists or institutions claiming to serve a journalist function; and so are fully governable by common journalist practices such as retractions.
Retractions are nice because they acknowledge that there was a human error somewhere in the organization’s processes, memorialize the error but then correct the record with supplementary and reviewable matter. Doing this also provides a signal to readers that even though this particular institution filled with these imperfect humans made a mistake on the record, they sufficiently value their reputation to own the mistake and correct it on the record.
That is a good thing. I want to see those changes.
Preventing people from seeing the change log of a page because "conspiracy theorists might use it" is dangerous thinking. Saying that it's okay to forego transparency because it could be used to bolster people who disagree with you is backwards. That's precisely why transparency should be retained - when you're the person disagreeing, it benefits you.
Case in point: On Jan 6, NPR published an article with a 10AM headline and timestamp about the upcoming Trump rally.
Later in the day, they changed the headline to be something like "Insurgents invade Capital building", but did not change the 10AM timestamp up top. One had to read the article to find the update timestamp.
Newsmaxx, and thus many if its viewers looked at the headline and headline timestamp and trumpeted "how did they know?! It's a conspiracy!"
I had to look into the wayback machine to see the original headline to show to a relative who'd bought the Newsmaxx narrative. I'm not sure they totally believed or even understood what I was telling them, but I am certain it raised some doubt.
All of that would was unnecessary, if only NPR had done proper change management on its articles.
This is the exact same because "conspiracy theorists might use it" reasoning just flowing in the opposite direction. Conspiracy theorists with conspiracy theorize regardless of the level of transparency provided by journalist organizations.
What!? NPR's website contains articles with false time stamps. Are you ok with this? Why does the conspiracy theorist angle matter at all?
Knowing when an article was written is a useful piece of information that is being destroyed by these always evolving articles. It might not be full on Orwell yet, but these always-mutating-articles are opening the door to an Orwellian future.
We need to be able to go back and look at the past unfiltered and unmodified.
>Why does the conspiracy theorist angle matter at all?
It doesn't. That was my point. I wasn't praising or criticizing NPR. I was saying that conspiracy theorists shouldn't be a reason either for or against transparency.
> Later in the day, they changed the headline to be something like "Insurgents invade Capital building", but did not change the 10AM timestamp up top. One had to read the article to find the update timestamp.
News websites really need to stop continuously rewriting their articles. It's a PITA if you want to cite them as a source, then all the sudden what you cited isn't there.
I've had NY Times articles get completely rewritten while I read them (admittedly with some long pauses between when I started and finished), and when I went back to quote something, it wasn't there anymore.
I don't think this is nefarious or anything, it's just them trying to adapt to expectations that they'll always be up to date with the latest stuff. You have the same article about some rapidly changing story hanging around their app/website all day (and "most popular articles" facets), and I suppose most people expect those things to be up to date.
> Sure, but they need to be clear that they aren’t committed to it being an accurate story at the time of publish (expectation of a newspaper).
You're misreading the situation. The media doesn't have a crystal ball any more than you or I do. They can be "committed to it being an accurate story at the time of publish," but then new stuff happens after that time, or they have the time to go into more depth. The news isn't just about accuracy, it's also about timeliness.
>The media doesn't have a crystal ball any more than you or I do.
Sure, but the media is not writing encyclopedia entries. They make hyperbolic claims about how they break stories before anyone else, and how accurate they are.
But since they are human, sometimes mistakes are made, and I think it's pretty dishonest to quietly change an article after it's been published. Publishing a story should mean that you back its content 100%, and it's the best, most accurate story you could have written with all available information. If new information comes out later that changes things, write a new article that references the mistakes of the original. There were still decisions made to include the content that was later shown to be incorrect, and I would _much_ rather see a follow up explaining what they got wrong than "correcting" the article after publication.
> Sure, but the media is not writing encyclopedia entries. They make hyperbolic claims about how they break stories before anyone else, and how accurate they are.
Well, breaking news stories is their job an no one else's.
> If new information comes out later that changes things, write a new article that references the mistakes of the original. There were still decisions made to include the content that was later shown to be incorrect, and I would _much_ rather see a follow up explaining what they got wrong than "correcting" the article after publication.
I'm sure a front page of mea culpas and minutiae about the process of reporting itself would scratch some people's ideological itches, but it wouldn't actually be very useful as an information source about what the current state of things are, which is what people are actually going there to get.
Personally I'd prefer they just issue a new version of the story with a kind of version history (or at least leave the old version up somewhere), at least for major revisions, but I also kind of empathize with them not wanting to do that, because that would probably be a feature almost exclusively used by annoying pests trying to stir up BS outrage (e.g. like the kind of people who think that software should never have bugs).
This seems like it would be a mess. My local news has a weather page that they constantly update. Sometimes 10 times an hour. While some people, like you, care about the original accuracy, I think most people don’t care at all about the past forecasts. I think a bunch of links and references to a change of the 1pm temperature forecast from 86 to 87 degrees would be more annoying than useful.
> If the news article was more like a Wiki (with revision history), would that be sufficient for you?
Not the person you were replying to, but I would love this, yeah. That changelog proposal being implemented would be more than enough to resolve most of the issues I have with publications that silently alter contents of their articles after they were originally published (without indicating that an alteration took place).
Maybe Journalists need to be better at their jobs and just more honest in general? Major publications should have revision history links as articles are changed. If anything some of them are clearly going out of their way to cover their tracks as the narrative changes.
I understand mistakes happen, but you should be always very clear on your corrections and if you are a web publication, have revision history links.
Source: Journalism degree holder that is tired of the MSM. I advise all the people I know to stop reading/watching it. So tired of the outrage driven news cycle that is often highly misleading.
This kind of thing also makes the internet less searchable.
I was trying to find some information on the previous activity of a cop who recently became infamous in my area for beating and choking a man who was pleading for his life, to see if he had ever been in the news before. So I used the time window feature on Google, only to get tons and tons of articles published that same day that were backdated years because of bad change management.
See for yourself on the link to a google search below, results are filtered between 2018 and January 2021, but every single article for the first five pages is about the incident that occurred two weeks ago, mistakenly backdated years.
> See for yourself on the link to a google search below, results are filtered between 2018 and January 2021, but every single article for the first five pages is about the incident that occurred two weeks ago, mistakenly backdated years.
Is that the news website's fault, or Google's fault?
The first two links are to what look like keyword/topic pages with many articles, and it wouldn't be surprising of Google pulled a different date than what you're looking for out of such a page. Some of the other hits appear to be old articles with a "new stories" bar (not sure exactly what you call it, here's an example: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/15/trump-admits-biden-won-ele...).
Personally, I don't consider Google date searching to be very reliable, IMHO. They're making a promise with it they can't really keep.
> It might work better if they searched on first-indexed date, rather than server modification timestamp headers or dates embedded within the page.
But that assumes they index things in a timely matter, which is likely not true a huge amount of the time.
And I don't think that would help in this case, because in many of the cases it appears they got the article date right, but the article page is dynamic and now includes snippets of stuff that post-dates the article.
Orwell never expected that Minitrue would come from private instead of government entities, but at this point I’m not even sure what is public and what is private anymore.
How is this not a better established position? I see Snopes as pure, unadulterated bias. Honestly, I see all those fact checking websites the same way.
Which is fine, though humorously this pairs nicely with another thread on HN this morning about HS critical thinking courses around journalism, quite well.
Your argument that because a known biased “fact checker” chose not to pounce on Trump for one absolutely stupid Reddit-style hive-mind circle-jerk, they are a bastion of impartial fourth estate in a significant number of articles?
You may have poor judgment when it comes to outlying events fitting in a trend.
Here's a story with a video in which Hunter Biden himself claims Russian drug dealers stole another one of his laptops for blackmail. And 'The Russians have videos of me doing crazy f**ing sex!
Huh, the article where they say "Trump did not explicitly tell people to 'storm' or 'breach' or 'break into' the Capitol" and instead “peacefully and patriotically” march does't fit the mold of "pure, unadulterated bias."
If a source makes questionable claims to the left or right, it is biased. If it makes questionable claims to the left and right, it is not biased, it just lacks quality.
It was a subjective call on whether ____'s use of phrases "you have to show strength" and "demand that ____ do the right thing" were meant to condone violence and crimes among ____ extremists without explicitly encouraging it.
With:
___ said they should “stay in the street,” “fight for justice,” and “get more confrontational.” But there was more context to ___ remarks, and ___ didn’t call for violence, nor did ___ words incite violence.
---
The first is from the article on Trump you cited (rated "Mixed").
Second quote is from an article about comments by Maxine Waters on George Floyd protests & LA riots (of which she explicitly said, "I call it a rebellion") https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/maxine-waters-comments/ (rated "False")
The pattern seems to be: If there's a way a favored speaker can be taken positively, that will be explained. If there's a way a non-favored speaker can be taken badly, it will be called out.
Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What's Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
A video shows Biden fumbling his words and apparently blanking on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's name at one point in the speech, although he had mentioned Austin's name a few minutes earlier without issue.
What's Undetermined
It's unclear whether Biden literally "forgot" his defense secretary's name at that moment, or whether, for example, he got stuck doing an extended "folksy" ad lib after initially tripping over his words.
I see it stated all the time, but whenever I ask why, instead of a substantial argument, I get downvotes or "isn't it obvious?" or some thinly veiled "how dare they debunk something I wanted to be true.".
The plagiarism accusation is interesting and should be resolved, but isn't evidence of misinformation or evidence that they are less reliable than [no known alternative] suggested by critics.
I love how ever single reply to the parent mentions Trump, as if anyone that thinks snopes is full of shit must be a Trump supporter. It's almost as if there's a group of people out there who all think exactly alike and knee jerk to defend these organizations out of some strange sense of loyalty.
>I love how ever single reply to the parent mentions Trump, as if anyone that thinks snopes is full of shit must be a Trump supporter.
Because there was no widespread vocal opposition to Snopes until Trump supporters started calling it "fake news" for debunking his claims about his inauguration turnout. Now they come out of the woodwork with every mention of the site to call it liberal propaganda and whatnot. No one else cares about the site that much - it's entertainment at best.
The thread they're replying to said nothing about liberal anything, although I would understand jumping to that conclusion if they had.
The widespread vocal opposition to Snopes is not simply from Trump calling it fake news, if anything his was a response just like the rest of us, a response to that organization plainly and blatantly lying to their readers repeatedly.
And yet if you ask people for a list of these blatant lies, most of the time they'll be items critical of Trump or of right-wing talking points.
I'm sure there are some people who don't like Snopes for whatever other reasons but it's obvious that much of the modern resentment against the site is driven by a political agenda.
Well sure, but those examples aren't the result of opposing bias. For the past 5 years any mainstream source or aggregator of information has been on a feverish rampage against Trump. Even if you don't like him it's plain as day. So of course a lot of the prominent examples are going to be that, because that's all they've been doing for 5 years.
And the reply in the other direction mentions Hunter Biden. I don't understand why! (We're still pretending we don't know that people are insinuating Snopes has a liberal bias right?)
If Trump makes a huge number of false statements during his tenure as the president he's going to get the attention of fact-checking sites...
I can tell you why, it's because it is a very prominent example of a blatant bald faced lie left as is to propagandize naive people who won't actually look into things themselves and delegate that role to Snopes.
If Trump makes a huge number of false statements it should attract the attention of everyone. People that delegate their own critical thinking to an entity claiming to be unbiased and informed in doing it for them are going to be misled one way or another.
The arbiters of truth get their legitimacy by never being wrong. Nobody is never wrong but you can give that illusion by removing any instances of you being wrong from history.
Ad revenue? A traditional news org might put up a paywall, but that presumably goes against Snopes' mandate of debunking nonsense for the masses. We here at HN tend to paste paywalled article links into archive.is. Sure, an adblocker does the job of depriving beneficiaries of ad revenue just as well, but this way there's at least a chance.
One possible scenario that's not evil: If they get something wrong and correct it, people that don't believe the correction can pass around links to the archive.org version before the correction.
Not saying I agree with the decision or that's why they did it, just a possible reason.
Why is that a bad thing? It's clearly marked as an archive. I'm also not sure how that fixes the problem, considering that people could still pass around images, which are pretty much taken as seriously as the real site.
I didn't say it was. I was just guessing at a possible reason they might have done it. I've seen anti-vax folks pass around archive.org links as well as pictures of stuff that was taken down/corrected before.
The fact that we have had good version control for decades and the journalism industry has not adopted it tells you their motives. It's like a godsend to someone who views themselves as a journalist, the ability to always be able to demonstrate their integrity. It almost takes more effort to not adopt it.
Obviously publishing work that isn't your own is wrong, but "plagiarize then rewrite" is a very effective method of developing a creative skill. There is a question about when the transformation really becomes "yours".
An example: Radiohead - "Creep" was a tranformation for The Hollies "The Air that I Breathe", Radiohead later went to sue Lana Del Rey for "Get Free" which seemingly was built with one of the two as a starting point.
The moral question is... when is copying actually ok? How much do you have to transform something until you don't "owe" the result to someone else... or more fundamentally, to what extent should any of us be able to own intellectual property? There are some valid arguments towards "none at all".
I’ve heard from authors that typing someone else’s entire novel helped them to understand the craft (and then they went on to write their own books, not based on the novels they typed).
And of course musicians learn other songs before they write their own.
But, copy/pasting an article, and then tweaking a few words to make it more unique, doesn’t seem like a great process for learning the journalism craft. At least not on the same level as the two examples I brought up.
If the "groove", "feel", or chord progression of such a song is identical or substantially similar to the song you copied from, you could still be liable for copyright infringement per Williams v. Bridgeport Music (the "Blurred Lines" case).
Before you complain, note well that among black musicians the groove is the song, the melody being something of an afterthought -- the exact opposite of what prevails in the white concept of music and, in particular, historical understanding of copyright law. Black musicians have been trying to get acknowledgement of ownership of their grooves for decades.
In general, it's not a good idea to use someone else's song as a starting point. In most cases, the original composer is going to be able to establish some form of "substantial similarity" to make you liable for infringement; it will take radical transformation to avoid this.
Archive links are used to bypass paywalls and direct traffic away from the site. (The moderator of this site encourages it [1], and archive links for most paywalled articles are in the comments.)
This could be a legitimate reason they were doing it (nefarious ones are easily imagined as well).
I wanted to post their original article on the corona virus and masks in the replies here and went to the wayback machine to find it and just learned they excluded themselves from the service. So I can see why they'd block that.
Snopes (& 'fact checking' in general) are scams...
Pedophrasty, Bigoteering, and Other Modern Scams
Clearing the discourse of abuses and abusers. The more you institutionalize rules of ethical behavior that should be voluntary, the more they will be used as a cover for unethical actions. https://medium.com/incerto/pedophrasty-bigoteering-and-other...
Snopes provides references and reasoning. It can be wrong, but the references can be checked by anyone interested in a subject. If Snopes were relying instead on because I said so then this might make sense, but it isn't. Maybe previous experience with fakery may have contributed to inspiration for a fact checking service?
Almost all these “fact checkers” exposed themselves on the lab leak theory which they had to redact after 1.5 years. Relying on any of them as a source of “truth” is asking for trouble. They are more of a narrative check.
What do you mean "your evidence"? I'm making no claims as to whether or not Snopes omits references. I'm merely pointing out that "My Grandma smokes and she's 100 years old" is not evidence that smoking doesn't kill.
> I'm making no claims as to whether or not Snopes omits references
Good, they clearly do not omit references, thanks for not challenging that!
Snopes has debunked hundreds of liberal falsehoods. Same thing as your grandma fallacy, er, example right? Those falsehoods the liberals said about Trump are actually true?
Like your "they don't omit references ever" straw man?
"This one case" meaning one of the most significant and contested events of the US election? Surely their far-left agenda would prevent them from publishing this?
This isn't "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer" level of insignificance.
You're still linking the retconned article. In the original it is as I said.
This new article is also extremely disingenuous. It argues "there's no evidence Wuhan isolated RaTG13". Well no shit, since the best evidence is that RaTG13 is completely made up, never existed in reality, and never existed on paper until early 2020. For snopes to take that evidence and turn it around and say it's evidence for the Wuhan Institute being totally reliable and trustworthy is perverse.
That is false, and I linked to a new, different article, not a "retconned" one. They didn't change their stance, they criticize those that do, and reference a medical journal article from 1.5 years ago as evidence.
As you said, you agree with the evidence they cite...
They rate "Did AOC Exaggerate the Danger She Was in During Capitol Riot?" as FALSE.
They also included a puff piece editorialization in it:
> "AOC was targeted with another round of bad-faith smears after giving an emotional, firsthand account of her experiences during the Capitol riot."
"So the claim that they investigate is:
"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exaggerated the danger she was in during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, in that she "wasn't even in the Capitol building" when the rioting occurred."
Instead of rating it mostly true, or a mixture, they rate it mostly false, and then state:
"What's True: Ocasio-Cortez wasn't in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate Chambers are located."
Included in their "fact check" are the following politically-biased statements (emphasis added):
"It took less than 48 hours for the right-wing disinformation machine to contrive a way to minimize what Ocasio-Cortez said she had experienced."
"In a circus of cyberbullying that began on Feb. 3, 2021, conservative news outlets and social media conspiracy trolls latched on to the misleading claim that Ocasio-Cortez “wasn’t in the Capitol building” and therefore was not in harm’s way, as she had described in the Instagram video."
To its credit, Snopes' main argument is that AOC never claimed she was in the Capitol building, which is an important point, but one example of "mostly-false right-wing disinformation" is a Red State headline, “AOC Wasn’t Even in the Capitol Building During Her ‘Near Death’ Experience.” Obviously, that headline is mostly true, arguably entirely true.
-----
Here is another example, coming from the beginning of the Trump Admin. Here is their page on a comparison of the Obama and Trump inauguration crowds which was a popular talking point of late night TV show hosts:
It includes this well-known blurry picture comparison (a meme, no less), and you can't even tell if it is a reliable comparison, as you can't even tell if either presidents are on stage yet:
The problem with fact checkers is that they're being brought into a different problem domain than what their practice is designed to combat. Social media companies more or less deputized them to be sources of truth; which carries bigger implications (albeit not as bad as people make it out to be) than just giving your opinion about a particular bit of information.
When Snopes says "the lab leak theory isn't real", they're basing it off of scientific research carried out early in the pandemic which claimed that the virus didn't look engineered. That is, effectively, an expert opinion - something close to truth but still subject to change should new information come to light. It's entirely reasonable for a fact checker to rely on that information at that time, as well as change their opinion in response to new information.
The bigger problem is that it wan't even an expert opinion. It was actually a political opinion coming from the mouths of experts. Here's my proof:
Many of the scientists have now admitted that they refrained from publicly acknowledging the evidence that the virus may have been engineered in the Wuhan lab. Alina Chan was one of those experts who says this now:
"... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."
It never occurred to these "scientists" that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats in China is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling by "scientists".
Good lord. I barely made a short 3 sentence long observational comment. What does it have to do with fox? You are basically doing an hominem attack.
And for what it's worth, no, I haven't followed corporate media (including cnn, msnbc, fox, nytimes, washington post etc). I pay for independent journalists on substack and locals instead.
Also the link which you provided is referring to RealClearPolitics being the real source, not fox. fox is doing an opinion piece on what RealClearPolitics reported. Exact same stuff which other left leaning sources do.
> You can just omit the references and reasoning that go against your narrative.
You can, but it will then be obvious to anyone familiar with the references or who has the power of reasoning that you have failed (innocently or not) to consider them, not that you have found something that debunks them.
But that doesn't matter, does it? Anyone familiar with the topic will already know what's up, and anyone interested enough to research the topic will be able to do so as well.
The point of declaring true/false is to have the final word for most readers. "No need to look further, Snopes said it's true". Sure, anyone can provide evidence to say you're wrong, but they're just some random blogger and nobody reads them. And on the off-chance that someone big picks them up, you apologize, adjust the verdict, and move on.
You don't need total control over the information of 100% of the population. Having a lot of control over the information diet of 70% of the population is great already.
> Anyone familiar with the topic will already know what’s up, and anyone interested enough to research the topic will be able to do so as well.
They will be able to do so…by reviewing and evaluating information from sources that provide the evidence and logic on which they rest conclusions. That a “fact checker” is such a source is…clearly something that matters.
> The point of declaring true/false is to have the final word for most readers.
And the point of providing support is to provide the ability for the readers that are willing to do more legwork to evaluate the claims, which is also how a fact checker gets (or loses, either because it fails to do this or because following back doesn’t support their claims) the reputation which allows them to be trusted by the users that don’t do the extra legwork. Same as any other source, because all a fact checker is is another research source that happens to be focussed on claims of current salience and controversy.
> “No need to look further, Snopes said it’s true”.
Which only holds up as a long as Snopes reputation holds up.
> Sure, anyone can provide evidence to say you’re wrong, but they’re just some random blogger and nobody reads them.
That would be a problem in a world where Snopes was the sole and universally accepted “fact checker” and every other source of information was regarded as “just a random blogger”. But there are lots of fact checkers (both standalone and as part of media organizations), and a lot of focus by interested parties with very influential platforms on the reliability of various entities that hold themselves out as fact checkers or other fact sources.
> The whole point of "fact checkers" is to be used by people who are not expert on the subject
A fact checker is a (usually tertiary, like an encyclopedia, providing references to primary and secondary sources) source that is distinguished by focussing on current, controversial claims. There is nothing more a "fact checker" can be. That's not a failing, that's an inherent limitation given the nature of facts.
I've found that they don't generally omit stuff, but the headlines and overall evaluations they give are suspect on more contentious items, almost to the point of a motte and bailey. So someone looking at the summaries will be mislead, but there's a more defensible opinion in the article proper.
Now, they do pull tricks like choosing which version of a claim to debunk and sometimes seemingly hunting for more obscure weak man versions of a claim than the more popular ones. Or they will "fact check" something that is clearly an opinion, like someone's read of someone else's motives.
The way I see it, though, they're hardly unique in this. Anyone skimming headlines is going to be badly mislead from nearly any source whatsoever.
Snopes is truly disappointing and slanted. It’s early days it was a good reference tool… sadly in our divided times Snopes has clearly a political slant.
Yes, I remember a site listing the most evil people that ever existed and decided to place Marx at the top. It is not exactly the same thing (as it was not a fact-checking site) but it was similar enough.
Although, is it really that the question? We have known that "both sides" have been bullshitting their way for ages. It's not as if this is a secret.
The only reason that people care about Snopes having a political slant is because 1: it is popular and 2: it pretends that it is not (by being a fact checker). I am not aware of any similar popular and generally considered credible right wing site.
I think you misunderstood the point you were responding to. I don't think they were suggested there are right leaning sites with similar type of bias, I think they were suggesting Snopes may have articles with similar right-friendly bias.
What do you think the errors are? The first one says "definition of 'convicted terrorist' is fuzzy, here are the specific convictions, which are different from what was claimed, which were dropped charges" which seems accurate for a "mixed" review - if the words you use are literally incorrect, how can you expect to have them reviewed as "true" even if you think it's a technicality. If they have a "mostly true" then there's a good argument that they should've used it; I don't know if they have that or not.
But the second one looks just plain correct. Here we are 5 months later and no Biden-mandated federal vaccine passports, after all.
You're very much quibbling on the definition of terrorist. She was convicted of having hundred of pounds of explosives while being an active member of a group that did bomb government buildings is good enough for most people to colloquially agree that is she is a convicted terrorist.
Yes I just looked, they do have 'mostly true' and they didn't use it. Honestly, if that first one doesn't make you roll your eyes I don't know what to say.
Would a reasonable person consider a person who was a member of a terrorist group that bombed the senate and was subsequently convicted of being in possession of large amounts of explosives and firearms a domestic terrorist? I think it's an emphatic yes.
It's like arguing that a man caught by police attempting to have sex with a 16 year old girl from the internet shouldn't be considered a sexual predator because he didn't succeed and there is no single universally-agreed definition for the age of consent.
Fair argument around "mostly true." I would've probably chosen that myself. But again, "convicted" is a big, specific, technical word, and it's hard for me to get past that, especially around potential liability issues of making such a claim, especially when the shown tweet specifically says she was convicted of three specific bombings that she very much wasn't.
Flip it on its head: can you claim with a straight face that "She was convicted for the 1983 bombing of the United States Capitol Building, The US Naval War College and the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Assoc" is not a blatant lie? It's a straightforward claim that would've been trivial to verify and correct before by the person who tweeted it, without even losing THAT much impact towards the argument they want to make, yet... they didn't.
So to establish bias... do we know of any right-wing terrorist-esque folks that Snopes is either less or more wishy-washy on? Seems like too specific a scenario to find anything direct on, the closes I can come up with is something like https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kelly-loeffler-kkk-member-... . There's a somewhat-close comparison https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-kkk-klan-wizard/ here but the part claimed false there is the exaggerated claim of "grand wizard."
(And are we agreeing that the Biden/vaccination one shows no bias at all?)
The core of their argument for the first is in the following section, and it rings pretty true for the mixed label:
However, prosecutors dropped those charges in 1990 as part of a plea deal involving other suspects in the bombings. As a result, Rosenberg was never tried or convicted on any charges relating to the 1983-1985 bombing campaign. The claim, made in @asdomke’s tweet, that Rosenberg was “convicted of” several 1983 bombings, was therefore false. The claim in the headline of an article on Wayne Dupree’s website that Rosenberg “carried out” the bombings stands in contrast to the fact that she was never tried or convicted in relation to those incidents.
During her 16-year incarceration, Rosenberg renounced the use of political violence, though her political beliefs appear not to have changed significantly. In a radio interview shortly after her release in January 2001, she said she “rejects” the “potential for violence in my past actions,” saying her view of violence as a strategic tool had undergone an “enormous change,” but that she retained “a political view that is certainly progressive and radical in a certain sense.”
Both those articles seem.. pretty good to me? The claims being debunked are clear spin, and the Snopes treatment gives important and reasoned context to explain things without engaging in blanket denialism.
Certainly someone who reads only the original partisan sources and NOT Snopes is going to be less informed about the truth. You'd admit that much, right?
I have seen some entries on snopes that seem to be trying very hard to be technically correct even though the story is substantially correct. I think the Rosenberg one is one example. I would say it was "mostly true" but I think they are trying to parse the meaning of words overly closely. Yes, technically she wasn't convicted of terrorism and the definition of terrorist is vague.
I would be interested if there are examples of conservative topics where they have either been as hair-splitting as in this example or if they were not as hair-splitting.
In this article, Snopes attempts to disprove the claim that the wave of refugees arriving in Europe in 2016 were mostly young and male by:
1. Cherry picking stats showing that Syrian refugees worldwide had an even gender ratio. This gender ratio does not hold when you examine Syrian (and non-Syrian) refugees arriving specifically in Europe:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2016/08/02/4-asylum-seeke...
2. Picking one specific photo to "debunk".
This seems to be the general strawman technique used by Snopes on political topics, as most critics of the 2016 refugee wave were specifically talking about refugees arriving Europe, whereas Snopes broadened the scope to the entire world in order to "debunk" that claim.
They made a list of 'Anti-Muslim extremists' and included both a victim of extremism and a former islamic extremist on it. Because their views which are informed by first hand experience are different from those held by the SPLC. Their entry on Nawaz also seemed to imply he was not a true muslim because he went to a strip club as well.
Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, because the bathwater (after careful searching) was found to have some impurity, is itself a tactic for pushing an agenda, not a fair and rational response. You can't just say "added eplanit => all bad, no trust", you have to show a pattern and intent, neither of which you have even attempted to do.
> An example being SPLC labeling ex-muslims as hateful "islamophobes".
Why is that an example? Plenty of ex-whatever-religion (or even ex-particular-denomination) people turn right into the most extreme and hateful bigots against the group they departed.
It’s a frequently commented on phenomenon among religious people, often not focussing on betrayal by departing members (where the bias of attachment to their own identity group might make them prone to overperceive) but on the trend among converts to their own religion.
It would be weird if a group tracking hateful religious bigots systematically excluded former members of the targeted religious group from the label.
Perhaps the phobia suffix in this case is being used as a political tool?
Do you really think that ex-Muslims are irrationally fearful of Muslims? Or, perhaps is handwaving away as "phobia" a cop out to any criticism at all?
EDIT: Seems like it still works, just call someone a phobe or an ist and instantly shut down any criticism. There are no ex-Muslims with valid issues against Islam because they're just bigoted, obviously. Use whatever word games you need in order to shut down conversation. Pretty interesting coming from the same people that say they care about women, gay, and minority rights.
> Perhaps the phobia suffix in this case is being used as a political tool?
The use of “-phobe” as a suffix with the meaning “bigot against” (rooted originally in the belief that bigotry is tied to fear, but now operating largely independent of any assumption of the basis of the particular bigotry) is pretty well-established in English; the main case where its not used are for gender-based bigotry where the “mis—ist” circumfix is used around an existing Greek root.
I have no love for these "fact checkers" which are nothing but mercenaries of the left but how does this revelation diminish the trust people should put on Snopes?
Can someone explain what the difference between this and pulling stuff off the AP machine is? I see almost identical news articles all the time across major news outlets.
My partner used to work at a company and would write all their news, spotlights and press releases. They commonly would see paragraphs taken by major news outlets without attribution. She tells me that’s just how it was.
I’m not in the industry but I thought copying from press releases and AP/Reuters sources was fairly standard. I’m sure there is a lot more to it here but I’m asking what the distinction is. Certainly I feel like plagiarism in the news isn’t quite the same as it is elsewhere.
Where are you seeing that he copied from press releases? The article says "material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times." That is very different from press releases.
I take it these weren't press releases. They were articles published by other journalists under a byline. When you issue a press release, you have particular information you want other journalists to pick up and spread. Attribution doesn't matter to you. If you are a journalist, you want to be credited. This is your bread and butter. Whoever is plagiarizing you is stealing your work.
I was only addressing press releases. I don't know about wire services. It's my understanding that publishing them as your own, or implicitly your own because of a lack of attribution, is just plagiarism.
If they pay the requisite fee it is licensed to them to do that, that is the wire services business model. It isn’t plagiarism if you pay for it and it’s done with the writers permission apparently.
I don't remember what our license agreement was exactly, but back when I was in school I did a weekly morning news slot on the school's FM station. I would take all my stories from the AP wire, and the rule was that I always had to start my segment with, "and now some of the top stories from the AP..." or similar.
Back when we had small town journalism, you'd get AP or Reuters as a service to be your world/national news department. The service was that they would give you a whole news department and you could copy paste the article and have your tiny news room writing about the basketball win and the bake sale.
That was the deal, but it's a subscription service for one. Secondly, the AP or Reuters got the by line in your paper.
Third, you don't change the article in any way. You don't use a piece of it, and ad you own comments. you paste the article on the page with an appropriate byline
His journalistic ethics are very much open to question. This is the guy that published a book containing the secret password to Assange's encrypted document dump. While he was supposedly cooperating with Assange on behalf of the Guardian.
> Third, you don't change the article in any way. You don't use a piece of it, and ad you own comments. you paste the article on the page with an appropriate byline
This has never been how AP works. Where are you even getting this stuff?
AP traditionally provides stories in an "inverted pyramid" [0] structure, such that an outlet can use as much or as little of the story as they need to fill a given space on the page.
They're free to modify the text as much as they want to. Such an article will list the Associated Press and whatever journalists edited, contributed, or otherwise mangled the original article. My (least) favorite modern example of this is when the Fox News website takes an AP article that makes the Republican party look bad and adds or subtracts to it until it's less damaging. The people responsible for that mangling are listed as contributors to such an article, as is the AP.
Media orgs will have a commercial deal with AP or Reuters that lets them more or less cut and paste whatever they want.
Here the guy got lazy and started copying filler from media without any agreement
I don’t see how it puts into question any fact checking though - the guy was just taking shortcuts to build articles, by plagiarising reliable journalists
it puts it into question because plagiarism like this is generally seen as unethical, and if you can prove someone did a significantly unethical thing, everything else they do can be put under scrutiny
Snopes is fundamentally trafficking in "trust". People refer to them with the question if something heard or seen should be trusted. Plagiarism is fundamentally a violation of trust: it represents work as original when it is not. If trust is violated in the production of the work, why would you believe that the facts presented are themselves trustworthy? Even if the plagiarist doesn't desire to mislead factually, they've already taken shady shortcuts to save some time... why wouldn't they also take shortcuts on diligence or verification? The problem is once trust is lost, you can't take for granted any measure of reliability given that trust verification is their product.
It doesn't disprove any fact-checking articles, but, as a hypothetical example, imagine if you learned a fact-checker was convicted of writing lots of bad checks. They might be perfectly honest in other areas of their life, but it creates a lot more skepticism, since you know they're willing to be dishonest in that one case.
Plagiarism isn't necessarily as dishonest as financial fraud, but it's still a form of dishonesty and likely also intellectual laziness. Dishonesty and intellectual laziness are the opposites of what you want in a credible debunker/verifier, no matter the relevance or severity.
Reprinting and attributing is allowed. Copying and not attributing it isn’t, because besides the whole theft aspect, it implies that you yourself observed or researched the given assertions.
I don't think attribution is as necessary as you make it sound like at least when it comes to AP/Reuters stories used by news orgs that are in partnership with them.
Generally you'll see that when an article is simply copied from AP or Reuters, it's credited that way; if it's used as a source or being rewritten, it'll be credited with a phrase something like "Wire stories from Reuters were used in this report".
News organizations that use wire services have contracts with those services that dictate how they use their articles. Often they contract the wire agencies for only certain type of content, and the price depends on how many categories and how in depth of content they want (e.g. full articles cost more than ticker lines). The details can vary, but usually articles ran verbatim are attributed to the agency, while articles that are merely based on articles from the agency are not attributed to the agency (in part to protect the agency in case the article turns out to be incorrect or etc.) but instead include a note at the end that they use content from the agency.
For articles run directly, it's part of the nature of those agencies and their contracts with their writers that the byline goes to the agency rather than the original writer (which is often multiple people anyway). This attribution is so common that back when newspapers were set in lead, and still sometimes today, a special ligature was used for AP, and sometimes for UPI and AFP as well.
Newspapers also sometimes run content directly from other newspapers, in which case the byline will list the author and original paper---and this is done under a contract with the other paper, either money changes hands or sometimes it's a mutual sharing agreement.
Plagiarism is wrong. It also isn't the same thing as publishing false or misleading information about the topic of the article plagiarized. In other words, the articles plagiarized don't become false or misleading because of the plagiarism.
FWIW, the Mikkelsons (couple originally behind the site) had a messy divorce and the lawsuits between their various entities continue to this day. The plagiarism here does seem pretty clear cut, but it's likely the funders of investigation have their own axe to grind.
Thanks for this, I had no idea why the site went downhill, and that dates it in my memory. Barbara Mikkelson was the only byline I actually remembered from Snopes, and was probably what I liked about it. I didn't know the other co-founder was an ex-usenet troll who started aggressively raising money right after she left, but it explains a lot.
also from the BF article (which also links to a wired story involving the divorce) which explains snopes direction:
>Mikkelson described his vision for the site’s future “as a platform for traffic-generating junk that people would complain about if it were on ‘classic’ snopes,” including articles copied from "viral item of the day" sites.
The notion of "fact checker" is semantic slight of hand meant to give such people an undeserved veneer of special credibility beyond the weak credibility of journalists. It lulls people into a false sense of security. "He's not a journalist. He's a FACT CHECKER. Oooo, trustworthy!" It's an arrogant title that arrogates the supposed authority to check facts and offer pronouncements on them.
All journalists, for example, are supposed to verify their claims (they don't, but that's a dereliction of duty). But here comes the "fact checker". "Stand aside, you unwashed masses. I have special access to the truth that you don't have! I have the means of verifying claims that go beyond the paltry powers of the journalist. I am...the FACT CHECKER MAN!"
The point is that the fact checker does not transcend the journalist. Investigative reporters are "fact checkers" but without the Ministry-of-Truth title of "fact checker" that's supposed to shut down conversation and ram through the "fact checker's" preferred narrative and accounting of the "facts".
Fact checkers reconcile memes/news media against primary sources/other news media while adding context, references, and journalistic integrity. Yes, they're human and inevitably bring their own biases, but do you really think we shouldn't have some folks doing that job?
I think you're trying to draw too fine a line. Fact-checking is definitionally part of the editorial process. In publications that don't have separate fact-checking departments, it would literally be part of the editor's job description.
> ...do you really think we shouldn't have some folks doing that job?
Yes. 100% it should be nobody's job to do this for you. Everyone should be doing that job for themselves. A society devolves to madness when people delegate verification of their world view to people chosen specifically for this purpose.
Journalists are supposed to fact check, but "fact checkers" like Snopes got into the business for checking non-journalistic sources. Snopes was founded for debunking urban legends, which spread by word of mouth rather than media.
Since then the line between word-of-mouth and journalism has blurred. Journalists don't always fact check (or even explicitly slant their news to mislead), and word-of-mouth goes far beyond urban legends into current events. Snopes' focus isn't the news, per se, but the news as reported via social media. That is sometimes repetition of a supposedly-reliable news source being circulated, or it may require them to run down the original source.
There are now "fact checkers" who make the journalists themselves their primary target, which is both an unfortunate consequence of the way journalism has slipped standards and something that should have existed in the first place to prevent that. They're not supposed to be a Ministry of Truth, but just another source of journalism doing what journalists are supposed to do.
If a "fact checker" is themselves biased, all you can do is build up a web of trust for who is doing good work and who isn't. The good fact checkers have a history of doing it right. Which includes correcting themselves when they do it wrong.
It's from BuzzFeed News, which has become a fairly reputable news organization. It even has a Pulitzer prize. It has an avowed left-wing bias, but it's not about listicles. They're doing serious reporting.
It's the same company as BuzzFeed, and the name certainly isn't doing it any favors. But this story isn't BuzzFeed-style junk. It's actually relevant, and most likely factual.
PayPal recently partnered with the ADL to ban accounts and prevent the wrong people from making transactions. Should be beyond concerning that not only they did that, but celebrated themselves for it. The ADL has ever widening definition of “problematic“ that extends to political topics far outside of their mission statement.
I would really have to think about who is less biased, the SPLC or the ADL.
Worth remembering that the term “fake news” did not exist in the mainstream until 6 years ago. It used to be called “liberal bias in the media” but fake news is a political slogan like Death Tax or Cancel Culture and like political slogans of previous generations I am optimistic we will not be stuck here forever.
"Fake news" was a phrase originating from the Clinton camp. Trump's political history has many examples of him taking Clinton's ideas that were getting a little traction and turning them on her. They were very close at one point.
The best defense against it is good journalism, honesty, clarity, and disclosure.
While on the topic, I remember reading articles during the 2016 election where journalists were doing legit work to track down the sources of those original "fake news" articles and the trail led to basically a business model that could be successful in poorer eastern european countries that just replied on clicks and they posted anything that'd garner a click. I even read an interview with one of them.
Then, when the narrative shifted to it being Russian intelligence, I never heard anything like my previous story again.
I'm really unclear what actually happened. Was that a progression of events, was it always Russian, was it never Russian?
“Fake news” emerged literally minutes after Trump won the election, in a seemingly coordinated way on most cable news. They were saying it in their most serious journalist voice, to imply that Trump voters were duped into voting for him. Then shortly after it was appropriated by Trump himself, and everyone wanted to disavow the phrase, which was deeply hilarious.
>Fake news” emerged literally minutes after Trump won the election, in a seemingly coordinated way on most cable news.
No, it didn't. the term became popular during his campaign to describe fake Facebook and other social media posts presenting themselves as legitimate news, but spreading false information. The term itself predates Trump's campaign entirely, though.
>They were saying it in their most serious journalist voice, to imply that Trump voters were duped into voting for him.
You expect to be taken seriously with juvenile caricatures like this?
>Then shortly after it was appropriated by Trump himself, and everyone wanted to disavow the phrase, which was deeply hilarious.
Trump used it all the time to describe any media coverage he didn't like, and later Trump claimed he invented the term (he didn't.) He probably wants royalties.
Not to label things you haven't researched yourself as "facts." You can instead label them with their sources. Even better, you can not jump into it at all if you're just copying from a another secondary source, and allow that source to get the traffic.
If you are the secondary source, you should of course include your references. If you're the primary source (e.g. you're quoting anonymous administration officials), feel free to declare it a fact; people shouldn't just believe you, but putting your reputation on the line is actually a good signal to me (contingent on said reputation.)
It certainly isn't government sources, and it's not traditional news sources, and big technology isn't a good choice either.
Snopes used to be a pretty good place to link to dispute clearly bullshit stuff that idiots would forward around the internet as if it had any chance of being true, but at some point there was just too much of that. And they also seemed to expand their scope into things that were more nuanced and easier to get wrong.
Given how much mudslinging has gone on with Snopes over the years, and how little I know about Buzzfeed News' journalistic integrity, I really wish there was a factchecking page about this on an established factchecking website...
HN is becoming less and less a place where issues are rarely discussed.
The most irrelevant comments always rise to the top and more and more people join in and waffle about nothing.
The interesting point in the article is this one:
"Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company."
How can the whatever whatever suspend her boss from editorial duties pending a comprehensive internal investigation? Did she clear that with her boss first?
What Covid has proved is that the whole media has become a pack of shills, which is false because they have always been pack of shills, only they were more subtle about it?
> How can the whatever whatever suspend her boss from editorial duties pending a comprehensive internal investigation? Did she clear that with her boss first?
From David Mikkelson’s statement (scroll to the bottom):
> I have given full authority to our managing editor, Doreen Marchionni, to take any measures needed to address these issues.
It's amazing how sleuths are able to uncover even subtle plagiarism from many years ago. If you take shortcuts , you will be found out eventually if someone is determined enough to find out. Eventually a few seemingly unrelated piece are arranged and shortly thereafter the full picture emerges.
I think the main take-away from this is that these "factcheckers" are just copying from a single line. In the desperate attempt to scoop up more cash, Snopes did the rewriting after posting rather than before, but as long as what you posted was identical to the NYT/WaPo line, it wouldn't be subject to any sort of examination or critique.
Anyway, aren't Snopes pages just links that Democrats post without reading as a comment under a reactionary or socialist relative's post on Facebook? Nobody is reading them, so the only thing that matters is the headline and the graphic.
I initially thought Snopes was a great idea, and in the early days it seemed quite handy.
Now its only really minorly credible.
My personal experience was finding an article that talked about something I was directly involved in, and it was clearly wrong. I basically lost most trust in its ratings however it does seem to basically cover the issue in text. My main quibbles are with when the article covers something substantially and then says the rating only depends on less than 10% of the article.
> My personal experience was finding an article that talked about something I was directly involved in, and it was clearly wrong.
Snopes can only go by what other sources have written, since they weren’t there. If you have direct personal experience, it’s certainly likely that your view will differ from the one reported by Snopes, for two reasons: Firstly, your view is by definition limited and personal, and is likely skewed one way or the other. But secondly, all journalists who write about something have similar incentives (i.e. to write an interesting ‘story’), and will therefore likely all choose a similar narrative based on a similar starting point.
I should note that Wikipedia has the exact same problem, since Wikipedia must limit itself to secondary sources.
> Snopes can only go by what other sources have written
Or they could do basic journalism: directly contact sources or seek access to first hand material and do cross-refence. It used to be the standard back in the days to have at least three independent sources before publishing a story.
If they did that, they would have no references to back up their claims. This is why Wikipedia does what it does; they need to be able to reference every claim.
> Snopes can only go by what other sources have written, since they weren’t there.
I have supplied information to correct articles. They were never updated. This information was easy to come by. One in particular involved timelines/history of bills in the US Congress which they were very wrong about. All you have to do is go to Congress's website and look up the history. The "fact checker" could not even bother to do this. They had a narrative to push and the were going to push it.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but just because you were 'directly involved' in something does not mean you know what was going on. Every day courts are filled with people who witness an event and present their own personal viewpoint upon the events; when the viewpoints differ it is not always because someone among them is being deceitful, sometimes two people can see the exact same set of events and walk away with completely different narratives.
While it's true that perspective is limited and memory is fallible, it's a pretty disturbing trend in society that some feel the need to tear down personal experience, and use sites like Snopes to do it.
Someone who lived through something probably won't know everything, but they'll certainly know more, especially about what they experienced, than someone who wasn't involved at all.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
I was one of three people working on the project, the other two people on the project also agreed that Snopes was full of it. The one source they used was from a rehash of a blog post. They made no attempt to interview any of us.
Good on you for remembering their credibility, but most people suffer from Gell-Mann Amnesia:
> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
I wasn't aware this effect had a name but it's what got me jaded on reading the news and how I always explain my feelings about it to people. Thanks for the link.
All modern media companies today have been built by using these kinds of shady "growth hacks."
Doesn't anybody see the irony of Buzzfeed calling out a fellow media company for using such tactics?
Buzzfeed's entire growth strategy for years was copy-pasting content from trending reddit threads and turning them into "listicles" with clickbait headlines, then feeding them into Facebook.
There's a term for that in journalism: "matching" a story. This traditionally involves legwork, such as contacting the same sources quoted in the first article to verify that facts are true.
This legwork is usually done by traditionally respected publications (i.e. not just copying and pasting). Other outlets and blogs with different goals do blatantly copy and paste, which produces articles less valuable than those traditionally matched.
Matching—versus copying and pasting—is important because it avoids the spread of false reports. From "The Elements of Journalism" by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel: "Originality is a bulwark of better journalism, deeper understanding, and more accurate reporting. […] In the era before curation and aggregation, the tradition of “matching” stories was rooted in the same idea. Rather than publishing another news outlet’s scoop, journalists tended to require one of their reporters to call a source to confirm it first. This tradition of matching was a way for news organizations to avoid having to credit their rivals, which in this earlier era was considered an embarrassing admission of being scooped. Yet the tradition of matching had another more important and salutary effect. Stories that couldn’t be independently confirmed would not be repeated."
A norm in the journalism industry is to credit the first publication who reported an investigative scoop, naming the outlet (e.g. this New York Times article [0] cites information reported by less-read Punchbowl News).
There can be positive effects of matching a story, but it depends on the journalists and the publication. Let's say The Wall Street Journal publishes a major investigative scoop, but you only pay for a Washington Post subscription. The Washington Post then matches the story to give readers access to the information, maybe with additional information or a unique angle, and sends a push notification to readers with the app. The WaPo article cites, and likely links, the WSJ if readers want to read the original report, and its readers become aware of the news.
That is the high-quality, professional version of matching. The low-quality, unprofessional version is echoing a story for clicks, but you're less likely to run into this if you are a newspaper subscriber who reads reports from publication apps (or alternatively, a reader who curates high-quality sources of reporting without paywalls).
I only run into matching while trying to find more information on a topic only to conclude that all the sources I find are just matching the initial article. Its an unfortunate side effect of the top down view search engines allow us I guess. Unfortunate cause its very frustrating and can waste up to an hour or so of your day if there are a few dozen articles on a subject. I should add that I dont follow any news sites accept aggregators. I can imagine that I would have issues with a local newspaper which I trust not reporting to me that the minister president was shot even though they could not possible have the scoop.
Sure seems so. When I followed the entire stallman controversy everyone just copied the first article sometimes citing it as a source of the controversial information to deter potential liability's but never to the credit Ir good of said source. Similarly on any other niche enough or single sourced event you see this behavior as if repeating some joke said by another person.
As the r/mildlyinfuriating discussion points out, the Buzzfeed article is both prefaced with the origin — i.e. "This week, a Reddit thread asked users that very question..." — and a link to that source. And each item (i.e. Reddit comment) is attributed to the Reddit user (e.g. "Walking out of the store without buying anything."
—lassissal), and a link back to the user comment. Plagiarism is the act of claiming authorship for someone else's content. Buzzfeed's profit-by-curation may be distasteful, but it's not plagiarism.
In any case, I think the average person understands that Buzzfeed is an aggregator, with a mission to get clicks and to entertain. Stealing content is wrong no matter what, but it isn't a direct contradiction of Buzzfeed's purported core purpose. Snopes' purported core purpose is to "have the real facts", and that purpose is directly undermined by lying about others' work being your own.
So using your logic, I'm totally free to copy-paste the entirety of a New York Times article onto my website and sell ads on that content...as long as I credit the author?
I think the lawyers of the NYT may have a different opinion about that.
The fact is, Buzzfeed was able to get away with stealing content from reddit and selling ads on it because no reddit user was ever going to hire a lawyer to sue them over it.
Also, I've certainly seen Buzzfeed content that was taken from Reddit without attribution.
That would be copyright infringement, but as long as its 100% clear that you are quoting or paraphrasing the NYTimes its not plagiarism. It's also not journalism or really even writing.
I would even call it stealing content. But plagiarism is about passing someone else's work off as yours.
I believe the New York Times would threaten to sue you — if they noticed you and cared enough (which I assume they would if you were operating a large enough site).
But also, when you post content to Reddit, you've granted them a (non-exclusive) license to reproduce it as they please. If Reddit's okay with Buzzfeed's reprinting, then I don't think it would legally been seen as stealing either.
In any case, your objection seems to be that plagiarism and repurposing of content (legal or not) fulfills the same evil end: profit from the labor of others. Sure, I'm not necessarily arguing against that. But I'm pointing out there's an additional element to plagiarism, which is the implication of independent, original reporting. To use a screenshot from the investigative article, which shows the Reuters and the Snopes version of a Supreme Court ruling:
By restating Reuters' assertions without attribution, Snopes implicitly implies that it has done the independent reporting and research (e.g. calling up the attorneys, downloading and reading the court docket). And the apparent "fact" that this Kentucky court clerk is denying licenses based on her religious beliefs becomes significantly more established "fact" when two different journalism outlets have independently confirmed it.
Snopes ostensible speciality is gathering and summarizing established facts, which includes filtering through the noise of fakery and also, redundant information. Committing plagiarism is not just immoral, but a direct attack on Snopes' reason for existence, and that what makes this situation especially notable beyond "Doesn't everyone do growth hacks?"
That's not what Buzzfeed is doing, though - they are taking individual quotes and snippets from the Reddit thread and weaving them into a narrative and description written in their own words. You could in fact do the same with a NYT article and it wouldn't be copyright infringement; there are many, many publications which create such articles based on mainstream news sources.
The exact opposite of plagiarism is original authorship.
Citing where you took the words from doesn't make you the author of those words.
I wouldn't even have a problem if Buzzfeed had just slightly rewrote the content from reddit. Because that would involve some effort. I wouldn't even care about attribution in that case.
But doing a full copy-paste, hitting publish and then collecting money for it is just disgusting.
Agreed. On a near daily basis I run across articles that are just summaries of things from other places. Sometimes it is a game of telephone where one site summarizes a second site that has summarized a third site.
But let's not kid ourselves that this is only online. It happens in all news media. One person breaks a story then all the other news outlets just repeat the original story sometimes with their own followup quotes.
Buzzfeed is a weird Jekyll & Hyde business. They have two businesses
i) the typical buzzfeed junk - Buzzfeed - This group follows no journalism practices, steals content from other sites, doesn't attribute, writes click bait articles, rebrands ads as articles, etc.
ii) the investigate journalism department - Buzzfeed News - this team has top notch investigative journalism. They actually do tons of original research, interview and cite sources, break big stories (many of the Uber scandals were found through their original research). Basically this group follows journalism standards and actually is at the top tier of investigative journalism.
The irony is that i) and ii) are run under the same brand and the only reason why Buzzfeed can fund investigate journalism ii) is due to the b.s. content they serve from i).
it's a weird scenario where the org is both the worst and best of journalism. Bu at least they have found a sustainable, albeit sleazy, way of funding investigative journalism.
Lots of other organizations who operate this way establish two separate brands so that the sleazy one doesn't sully the other. I'm kind of surprised that Buzzfeed News hasn't ditched the "Buzzfeed" name, even if it's still run by the parent company.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/31/fact-c...
Facebook contracted with Snopes to fact check the news. Snopes knew that if they kept labeling obvious satire as false, The Bee would be more difficult to share on Facebook and potentially banned.
This happened, but Facebook realized the error and no longer uses Snopes for fact-checking.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/03/...
if you can't trust fact-checkers to check their facts, then what purpose do they serve? if some rando on twitter or whatever tries to "fact check" the Bee and doesn't see it as satire, then gets called out on it and modifies their statement, then who cares... but if the whole point of your business is to check facts, and is touted as such to the point where major social media sites and search engines directly cite your fact-checkings in a UI-integrated way, then, well...
Organizations have more credibility when they realize their errors before the lawyers get involved.
But very unsurprising to see this from the already biased 'fact checkers'.
Not the most immediate important thing, but hiding content from the Wayback Machine that is purported to be factual record is very problematic, to say the least
Edit: on re-reading I realize it’s so that they don’t get caught for this plagiarism since their modus operandi was plagiarize first rewrite slowly.
If you're going to debunk an article about something like a lack of vaccine safety and need to retract a couple of sentences later, but the overall conclusion is the same, then the conspiracists will be right on you with a diff of the changes from the archive trying to piece together what it all means and who paid you off.
Sadly if you do retractions, you are not qualified for the name "fact checker". Because "facts" are not retractable.
And fact-checkers are just the tip of the iceberg, and if you care to look, there are many things that are peddled as being "fact" when there is not enough credible evidence to say so..
For example the statement "Vaccines don't cause autism". Any one with two brain cells will know that this NOT a fact, simply because it does not say "Which vaccines".
But that does not prevent people from saying that as a FACT.
So it is not only them. It is you as well.
That said, fact checks are typically written by journalists or institutions claiming to serve a journalist function; and so are fully governable by common journalist practices such as retractions.
Retractions are nice because they acknowledge that there was a human error somewhere in the organization’s processes, memorialize the error but then correct the record with supplementary and reviewable matter. Doing this also provides a signal to readers that even though this particular institution filled with these imperfect humans made a mistake on the record, they sufficiently value their reputation to own the mistake and correct it on the record.
Good faith and honesty can take you far.
Preventing people from seeing the change log of a page because "conspiracy theorists might use it" is dangerous thinking. Saying that it's okay to forego transparency because it could be used to bolster people who disagree with you is backwards. That's precisely why transparency should be retained - when you're the person disagreeing, it benefits you.
Later in the day, they changed the headline to be something like "Insurgents invade Capital building", but did not change the 10AM timestamp up top. One had to read the article to find the update timestamp.
Newsmaxx, and thus many if its viewers looked at the headline and headline timestamp and trumpeted "how did they know?! It's a conspiracy!"
I had to look into the wayback machine to see the original headline to show to a relative who'd bought the Newsmaxx narrative. I'm not sure they totally believed or even understood what I was telling them, but I am certain it raised some doubt.
All of that would was unnecessary, if only NPR had done proper change management on its articles.
Knowing when an article was written is a useful piece of information that is being destroyed by these always evolving articles. It might not be full on Orwell yet, but these always-mutating-articles are opening the door to an Orwellian future.
We need to be able to go back and look at the past unfiltered and unmodified.
It doesn't. That was my point. I wasn't praising or criticizing NPR. I was saying that conspiracy theorists shouldn't be a reason either for or against transparency.
News websites really need to stop continuously rewriting their articles. It's a PITA if you want to cite them as a source, then all the sudden what you cited isn't there.
I've had NY Times articles get completely rewritten while I read them (admittedly with some long pauses between when I started and finished), and when I went back to quote something, it wasn't there anymore.
I don't think this is nefarious or anything, it's just them trying to adapt to expectations that they'll always be up to date with the latest stuff. You have the same article about some rapidly changing story hanging around their app/website all day (and "most popular articles" facets), and I suppose most people expect those things to be up to date.
If they want to be an encyclopedia then be one.
You're misreading the situation. The media doesn't have a crystal ball any more than you or I do. They can be "committed to it being an accurate story at the time of publish," but then new stuff happens after that time, or they have the time to go into more depth. The news isn't just about accuracy, it's also about timeliness.
Sure, but the media is not writing encyclopedia entries. They make hyperbolic claims about how they break stories before anyone else, and how accurate they are.
But since they are human, sometimes mistakes are made, and I think it's pretty dishonest to quietly change an article after it's been published. Publishing a story should mean that you back its content 100%, and it's the best, most accurate story you could have written with all available information. If new information comes out later that changes things, write a new article that references the mistakes of the original. There were still decisions made to include the content that was later shown to be incorrect, and I would _much_ rather see a follow up explaining what they got wrong than "correcting" the article after publication.
Well, breaking news stories is their job an no one else's.
> If new information comes out later that changes things, write a new article that references the mistakes of the original. There were still decisions made to include the content that was later shown to be incorrect, and I would _much_ rather see a follow up explaining what they got wrong than "correcting" the article after publication.
I'm sure a front page of mea culpas and minutiae about the process of reporting itself would scratch some people's ideological itches, but it wouldn't actually be very useful as an information source about what the current state of things are, which is what people are actually going there to get.
Personally I'd prefer they just issue a new version of the story with a kind of version history (or at least leave the old version up somewhere), at least for major revisions, but I also kind of empathize with them not wanting to do that, because that would probably be a feature almost exclusively used by annoying pests trying to stir up BS outrage (e.g. like the kind of people who think that software should never have bugs).
By having a fluid changing story, two people won’t even have the same reference point if they both read the same NYTimes article.
Not the person you were replying to, but I would love this, yeah. That changelog proposal being implemented would be more than enough to resolve most of the issues I have with publications that silently alter contents of their articles after they were originally published (without indicating that an alteration took place).
I understand mistakes happen, but you should be always very clear on your corrections and if you are a web publication, have revision history links.
Source: Journalism degree holder that is tired of the MSM. I advise all the people I know to stop reading/watching it. So tired of the outrage driven news cycle that is often highly misleading.
I was trying to find some information on the previous activity of a cop who recently became infamous in my area for beating and choking a man who was pleading for his life, to see if he had ever been in the news before. So I used the time window feature on Google, only to get tons and tons of articles published that same day that were backdated years because of bad change management.
See for yourself on the link to a google search below, results are filtered between 2018 and January 2021, but every single article for the first five pages is about the incident that occurred two weeks ago, mistakenly backdated years.
https://bit.ly/3xEpCGA
Is that the news website's fault, or Google's fault?
The first two links are to what look like keyword/topic pages with many articles, and it wouldn't be surprising of Google pulled a different date than what you're looking for out of such a page. Some of the other hits appear to be old articles with a "new stories" bar (not sure exactly what you call it, here's an example: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/15/trump-admits-biden-won-ele...).
Personally, I don't consider Google date searching to be very reliable, IMHO. They're making a promise with it they can't really keep.
It might work better if they searched on first-indexed date, rather than server modification timestamp headers or dates embedded within the page.
But that assumes they index things in a timely matter, which is likely not true a huge amount of the time.
And I don't think that would help in this case, because in many of the cases it appears they got the article date right, but the article page is dynamic and now includes snippets of stuff that post-dates the article.
Just saying I can see how you could rationalise this decision, even if it’s a terrible idea.
Which is fine, though humorously this pairs nicely with another thread on HN this morning about HS critical thinking courses around journalism, quite well.
I'm being downvoted because what I said is hurting people's feelings and sensibilities, but it's the truth.
The people who run it are, well...https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4042194/Facebook-fa....
And also for linking the daily mail
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-wear-pants-backwards...
Snopes says he wasn't, and shows evidence why. That's just "pure, unadulterated bias" though, right? His pants are on backwards?
Otherwise "I see Snopes as pure, unadulterated bias" would be such a broad generalization it's meaningless!
You may have poor judgment when it comes to outlying events fitting in a trend.
Could you please elaborate? I have never seen them described like this.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-hunter-biden-porn/
They have not updated the fact check.
Here's a story with a video in which Hunter Biden himself claims Russian drug dealers stole another one of his laptops for blackmail. And 'The Russians have videos of me doing crazy f**ing sex!
Source with the Video: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9881213/Unearthed-v...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-tell-supporters-stor...
I'm so confused!
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-s...
Compare:
With: ---The first is from the article on Trump you cited (rated "Mixed").
Second quote is from an article about comments by Maxine Waters on George Floyd protests & LA riots (of which she explicitly said, "I call it a rebellion") https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/maxine-waters-comments/ (rated "False")
The pattern seems to be: If there's a way a favored speaker can be taken positively, that will be explained. If there's a way a non-favored speaker can be taken badly, it will be called out.
Rating: Mixture
What's True
Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What's Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-forgot-defense-secre...
Rating: Mixture
What's True
A video shows Biden fumbling his words and apparently blanking on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's name at one point in the speech, although he had mentioned Austin's name a few minutes earlier without issue.
What's Undetermined
It's unclear whether Biden literally "forgot" his defense secretary's name at that moment, or whether, for example, he got stuck doing an extended "folksy" ad lib after initially tripping over his words.
The plagiarism accusation is interesting and should be resolved, but isn't evidence of misinformation or evidence that they are less reliable than [no known alternative] suggested by critics.
Oh, they said Trump told the truth when he said "Murders this year have spiked 27% in Philadelphia."
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/24/donald-tru...
Why didn't anyone remind them of their bias before this got published?
Because there was no widespread vocal opposition to Snopes until Trump supporters started calling it "fake news" for debunking his claims about his inauguration turnout. Now they come out of the woodwork with every mention of the site to call it liberal propaganda and whatnot. No one else cares about the site that much - it's entertainment at best.
The widespread vocal opposition to Snopes is not simply from Trump calling it fake news, if anything his was a response just like the rest of us, a response to that organization plainly and blatantly lying to their readers repeatedly.
I'm sure there are some people who don't like Snopes for whatever other reasons but it's obvious that much of the modern resentment against the site is driven by a political agenda.
If Trump makes a huge number of false statements during his tenure as the president he's going to get the attention of fact-checking sites...
If Trump makes a huge number of false statements it should attract the attention of everyone. People that delegate their own critical thinking to an entity claiming to be unbiased and informed in doing it for them are going to be misled one way or another.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-video-insulting-supp...
According to you, they are wrong, though. Ignore evidence to the contrary.
Not saying I agree with the decision or that's why they did it, just a possible reason.
Obviously publishing work that isn't your own is wrong, but "plagiarize then rewrite" is a very effective method of developing a creative skill. There is a question about when the transformation really becomes "yours".
An example: Radiohead - "Creep" was a tranformation for The Hollies "The Air that I Breathe", Radiohead later went to sue Lana Del Rey for "Get Free" which seemingly was built with one of the two as a starting point.
The moral question is... when is copying actually ok? How much do you have to transform something until you don't "owe" the result to someone else... or more fundamentally, to what extent should any of us be able to own intellectual property? There are some valid arguments towards "none at all".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaXFc4Zb78s
And of course musicians learn other songs before they write their own.
But, copy/pasting an article, and then tweaking a few words to make it more unique, doesn’t seem like a great process for learning the journalism craft. At least not on the same level as the two examples I brought up.
Before you complain, note well that among black musicians the groove is the song, the melody being something of an afterthought -- the exact opposite of what prevails in the white concept of music and, in particular, historical understanding of copyright law. Black musicians have been trying to get acknowledgement of ownership of their grooves for decades.
In general, it's not a good idea to use someone else's song as a starting point. In most cases, the original composer is going to be able to establish some form of "substantial similarity" to make you liable for infringement; it will take radical transformation to avoid this.
This could be a legitimate reason they were doing it (nefarious ones are easily imagined as well).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
Pedophrasty, Bigoteering, and Other Modern Scams Clearing the discourse of abuses and abusers. The more you institutionalize rules of ethical behavior that should be voluntary, the more they will be used as a cover for unethical actions. https://medium.com/incerto/pedophrasty-bigoteering-and-other...
The Facts are True, the News is Fake https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa...
> "Trump did not explicitly tell people to 'storm' or 'breach' or 'break into' the [US] Capitol."
and included the reasoning that
> the president called on supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” march or walk to the Capitol
...but wait, their far-left narrative! Why didn't they omit those references and reasoning?!
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-tell-supporters-stor...
Back on topic: why didn't they omit those references and reasoning regarding the Capitol?!
https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/06/02/covid-19-why-the-lab-...
Your argument seems to be: Because Snopes didn't omit references in this one case, they don't omit references ever.
I've got no dog in this fight, but please, the logical fallacies are hurting my brain.
Good, they clearly do not omit references, thanks for not challenging that!
Snopes has debunked hundreds of liberal falsehoods. Same thing as your grandma fallacy, er, example right? Those falsehoods the liberals said about Trump are actually true?
Like your "they don't omit references ever" straw man?
"This one case" meaning one of the most significant and contested events of the US election? Surely their far-left agenda would prevent them from publishing this?
This isn't "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer" level of insignificance.
What you said is not true, and their position hasn't shifted (they're critical of those that did). https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/
This new article is also extremely disingenuous. It argues "there's no evidence Wuhan isolated RaTG13". Well no shit, since the best evidence is that RaTG13 is completely made up, never existed in reality, and never existed on paper until early 2020. For snopes to take that evidence and turn it around and say it's evidence for the Wuhan Institute being totally reliable and trustworthy is perverse.
As you said, you agree with the evidence they cite...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/aoc-capitol-attack/
They rate "Did AOC Exaggerate the Danger She Was in During Capitol Riot?" as FALSE.
They also included a puff piece editorialization in it:
> "AOC was targeted with another round of bad-faith smears after giving an emotional, firsthand account of her experiences during the Capitol riot."
"So the claim that they investigate is:
"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exaggerated the danger she was in during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, in that she "wasn't even in the Capitol building" when the rioting occurred."
Instead of rating it mostly true, or a mixture, they rate it mostly false, and then state:
"What's True: Ocasio-Cortez wasn't in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate Chambers are located."
Included in their "fact check" are the following politically-biased statements (emphasis added):
"It took less than 48 hours for the right-wing disinformation machine to contrive a way to minimize what Ocasio-Cortez said she had experienced."
"In a circus of cyberbullying that began on Feb. 3, 2021, conservative news outlets and social media conspiracy trolls latched on to the misleading claim that Ocasio-Cortez “wasn’t in the Capitol building” and therefore was not in harm’s way, as she had described in the Instagram video."
To its credit, Snopes' main argument is that AOC never claimed she was in the Capitol building, which is an important point, but one example of "mostly-false right-wing disinformation" is a Red State headline, “AOC Wasn’t Even in the Capitol Building During Her ‘Near Death’ Experience.” Obviously, that headline is mostly true, arguably entirely true.
-----
Here is another example, coming from the beginning of the Trump Admin. Here is their page on a comparison of the Obama and Trump inauguration crowds which was a popular talking point of late night TV show hosts:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/01/20/obamas-inauguration-c...
It includes this well-known blurry picture comparison (a meme, no less), and you can't even tell if it is a reliable comparison, as you can't even tell if either presidents are on stage yet:
https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2017/01/a17.jpg
Now compare that to this:
Obama crowd, with Obama on stage:
https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/president-barack-obama-...
Trump crowd, with Trump on stage:
https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/president-donald-trump-...
Another angle matching similar to Obama's angle:
https://www.usmessageboard.com/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2F...
It's very easy to tell that Snopes used pictures of the crowd from different times to sell their narrative.
Multiple people had contacted Snopes a few ...
When Snopes says "the lab leak theory isn't real", they're basing it off of scientific research carried out early in the pandemic which claimed that the virus didn't look engineered. That is, effectively, an expert opinion - something close to truth but still subject to change should new information come to light. It's entirely reasonable for a fact checker to rely on that information at that time, as well as change their opinion in response to new information.
Many of the scientists have now admitted that they refrained from publicly acknowledging the evidence that the virus may have been engineered in the Wuhan lab. Alina Chan was one of those experts who says this now:
"... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory...
It never occurred to these "scientists" that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats in China is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling by "scientists".
https://www.foxnews.com/media/realclearpolitics-fact-checker...
And for what it's worth, no, I haven't followed corporate media (including cnn, msnbc, fox, nytimes, washington post etc). I pay for independent journalists on substack and locals instead.
Also the link which you provided is referring to RealClearPolitics being the real source, not fox. fox is doing an opinion piece on what RealClearPolitics reported. Exact same stuff which other left leaning sources do.
Were you trying to spell "ad hominem?"
> fox is doing an opinion piece on what RealClearPolitics reported
Right, which is the argument I said you regurgitated. It's such a cliché even Fox News already moved on to new talking points.
You can, but it will then be obvious to anyone familiar with the references or who has the power of reasoning that you have failed (innocently or not) to consider them, not that you have found something that debunks them.
The point of declaring true/false is to have the final word for most readers. "No need to look further, Snopes said it's true". Sure, anyone can provide evidence to say you're wrong, but they're just some random blogger and nobody reads them. And on the off-chance that someone big picks them up, you apologize, adjust the verdict, and move on.
You don't need total control over the information of 100% of the population. Having a lot of control over the information diet of 70% of the population is great already.
Yes, it does.
> Anyone familiar with the topic will already know what’s up, and anyone interested enough to research the topic will be able to do so as well.
They will be able to do so…by reviewing and evaluating information from sources that provide the evidence and logic on which they rest conclusions. That a “fact checker” is such a source is…clearly something that matters.
> The point of declaring true/false is to have the final word for most readers.
And the point of providing support is to provide the ability for the readers that are willing to do more legwork to evaluate the claims, which is also how a fact checker gets (or loses, either because it fails to do this or because following back doesn’t support their claims) the reputation which allows them to be trusted by the users that don’t do the extra legwork. Same as any other source, because all a fact checker is is another research source that happens to be focussed on claims of current salience and controversy.
> “No need to look further, Snopes said it’s true”.
Which only holds up as a long as Snopes reputation holds up.
> Sure, anyone can provide evidence to say you’re wrong, but they’re just some random blogger and nobody reads them.
That would be a problem in a world where Snopes was the sole and universally accepted “fact checker” and every other source of information was regarded as “just a random blogger”. But there are lots of fact checkers (both standalone and as part of media organizations), and a lot of focus by interested parties with very influential platforms on the reliability of various entities that hold themselves out as fact checkers or other fact sources.
The whole point of "fact checkers" is to be used by people who are not expert on the subject
A fact checker is a (usually tertiary, like an encyclopedia, providing references to primary and secondary sources) source that is distinguished by focussing on current, controversial claims. There is nothing more a "fact checker" can be. That's not a failing, that's an inherent limitation given the nature of facts.
Now, they do pull tricks like choosing which version of a claim to debunk and sometimes seemingly hunting for more obscure weak man versions of a claim than the more popular ones. Or they will "fact check" something that is clearly an opinion, like someone's read of someone else's motives.
The way I see it, though, they're hardly unique in this. Anyone skimming headlines is going to be badly mislead from nearly any source whatsoever.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-vaccine-passport/
The question is now whether you can find similar "right-friendly" stories that show a similar "hesitation" in the labelling. Probably you can.
Although, is it really that the question? We have known that "both sides" have been bullshitting their way for ages. It's not as if this is a secret.
The only reason that people care about Snopes having a political slant is because 1: it is popular and 2: it pretends that it is not (by being a fact checker). I am not aware of any similar popular and generally considered credible right wing site.
But the second one looks just plain correct. Here we are 5 months later and no Biden-mandated federal vaccine passports, after all.
Would a reasonable person consider a person who was a member of a terrorist group that bombed the senate and was subsequently convicted of being in possession of large amounts of explosives and firearms a domestic terrorist? I think it's an emphatic yes.
It's like arguing that a man caught by police attempting to have sex with a 16 year old girl from the internet shouldn't be considered a sexual predator because he didn't succeed and there is no single universally-agreed definition for the age of consent.
Flip it on its head: can you claim with a straight face that "She was convicted for the 1983 bombing of the United States Capitol Building, The US Naval War College and the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Assoc" is not a blatant lie? It's a straightforward claim that would've been trivial to verify and correct before by the person who tweeted it, without even losing THAT much impact towards the argument they want to make, yet... they didn't.
So to establish bias... do we know of any right-wing terrorist-esque folks that Snopes is either less or more wishy-washy on? Seems like too specific a scenario to find anything direct on, the closes I can come up with is something like https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kelly-loeffler-kkk-member-... . There's a somewhat-close comparison https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-kkk-klan-wizard/ here but the part claimed false there is the exaggerated claim of "grand wizard."
(And are we agreeing that the Biden/vaccination one shows no bias at all?)
However, prosecutors dropped those charges in 1990 as part of a plea deal involving other suspects in the bombings. As a result, Rosenberg was never tried or convicted on any charges relating to the 1983-1985 bombing campaign. The claim, made in @asdomke’s tweet, that Rosenberg was “convicted of” several 1983 bombings, was therefore false. The claim in the headline of an article on Wayne Dupree’s website that Rosenberg “carried out” the bombings stands in contrast to the fact that she was never tried or convicted in relation to those incidents.
During her 16-year incarceration, Rosenberg renounced the use of political violence, though her political beliefs appear not to have changed significantly. In a radio interview shortly after her release in January 2001, she said she “rejects” the “potential for violence in my past actions,” saying her view of violence as a strategic tool had undergone an “enormous change,” but that she retained “a political view that is certainly progressive and radical in a certain sense.”
Certainly someone who reads only the original partisan sources and NOT Snopes is going to be less informed about the truth. You'd admit that much, right?
I would be interested if there are examples of conservative topics where they have either been as hair-splitting as in this example or if they were not as hair-splitting.
In this article, Snopes attempts to disprove the claim that the wave of refugees arriving in Europe in 2016 were mostly young and male by:
1. Cherry picking stats showing that Syrian refugees worldwide had an even gender ratio. This gender ratio does not hold when you examine Syrian (and non-Syrian) refugees arriving specifically in Europe: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2016/08/02/4-asylum-seeke...
2. Picking one specific photo to "debunk".
This seems to be the general strawman technique used by Snopes on political topics, as most critics of the 2016 refugee wave were specifically talking about refugees arriving Europe, whereas Snopes broadened the scope to the entire world in order to "debunk" that claim.
Now, me, I like my organizations to never admit-- uh, I mean make mistakes.
[0] https://www.splcenter.org/splc-statement-video
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maajid-...
Why is that an example? Plenty of ex-whatever-religion (or even ex-particular-denomination) people turn right into the most extreme and hateful bigots against the group they departed.
It’s a frequently commented on phenomenon among religious people, often not focussing on betrayal by departing members (where the bias of attachment to their own identity group might make them prone to overperceive) but on the trend among converts to their own religion.
It would be weird if a group tracking hateful religious bigots systematically excluded former members of the targeted religious group from the label.
Do you really think that ex-Muslims are irrationally fearful of Muslims? Or, perhaps is handwaving away as "phobia" a cop out to any criticism at all?
EDIT: Seems like it still works, just call someone a phobe or an ist and instantly shut down any criticism. There are no ex-Muslims with valid issues against Islam because they're just bigoted, obviously. Use whatever word games you need in order to shut down conversation. Pretty interesting coming from the same people that say they care about women, gay, and minority rights.
The use of “-phobe” as a suffix with the meaning “bigot against” (rooted originally in the belief that bigotry is tied to fear, but now operating largely independent of any assumption of the basis of the particular bigotry) is pretty well-established in English; the main case where its not used are for gender-based bigotry where the “mis—ist” circumfix is used around an existing Greek root.
My partner used to work at a company and would write all their news, spotlights and press releases. They commonly would see paragraphs taken by major news outlets without attribution. She tells me that’s just how it was.
I’m not in the industry but I thought copying from press releases and AP/Reuters sources was fairly standard. I’m sure there is a lot more to it here but I’m asking what the distinction is. Certainly I feel like plagiarism in the news isn’t quite the same as it is elsewhere.
> If they pay the requisite fee it is licensed to them to do that, that is the wire services business model.
Licensees are required to attribute AP-sourced content to AP.
That was the deal, but it's a subscription service for one. Secondly, the AP or Reuters got the by line in your paper. Third, you don't change the article in any way. You don't use a piece of it, and ad you own comments. you paste the article on the page with an appropriate byline
For example, the current main article on The Guardian's website is:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/13/taliban-seize-...
which has a byline of:
"Luke Harding and agencies"
His journalistic ethics are very much open to question. This is the guy that published a book containing the secret password to Assange's encrypted document dump. While he was supposedly cooperating with Assange on behalf of the Guardian.
This has never been how AP works. Where are you even getting this stuff?
AP traditionally provides stories in an "inverted pyramid" [0] structure, such that an outlet can use as much or as little of the story as they need to fill a given space on the page.
They're free to modify the text as much as they want to. Such an article will list the Associated Press and whatever journalists edited, contributed, or otherwise mangled the original article. My (least) favorite modern example of this is when the Fox News website takes an AP article that makes the Republican party look bad and adds or subtracts to it until it's less damaging. The people responsible for that mangling are listed as contributors to such an article, as is the AP.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
Here the guy got lazy and started copying filler from media without any agreement
I don’t see how it puts into question any fact checking though - the guy was just taking shortcuts to build articles, by plagiarising reliable journalists
Plagiarism isn't necessarily as dishonest as financial fraud, but it's still a form of dishonesty and likely also intellectual laziness. Dishonesty and intellectual laziness are the opposites of what you want in a credible debunker/verifier, no matter the relevance or severity.
He was taking ownership of work which was not his and profiting from it with ads and facebook traffic.
For articles run directly, it's part of the nature of those agencies and their contracts with their writers that the byline goes to the agency rather than the original writer (which is often multiple people anyway). This attribution is so common that back when newspapers were set in lead, and still sometimes today, a special ligature was used for AP, and sometimes for UPI and AFP as well.
Newspapers also sometimes run content directly from other newspapers, in which case the byline will list the author and original paper---and this is done under a contract with the other paper, either money changes hands or sometimes it's a mutual sharing agreement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516283
Seriously? The same foodbabe that said "subway bread was made of yoga mats"?
That being said I decided to remove it because it was linked in the linked post tree by beerandt.
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/26/539576135/fact-checking-websi...
>Mikkelson described his vision for the site’s future “as a platform for traffic-generating junk that people would complain about if it were on ‘classic’ snopes,” including articles copied from "viral item of the day" sites.
All journalists, for example, are supposed to verify their claims (they don't, but that's a dereliction of duty). But here comes the "fact checker". "Stand aside, you unwashed masses. I have special access to the truth that you don't have! I have the means of verifying claims that go beyond the paltry powers of the journalist. I am...the FACT CHECKER MAN!"
The point is that the fact checker does not transcend the journalist. Investigative reporters are "fact checkers" but without the Ministry-of-Truth title of "fact checker" that's supposed to shut down conversation and ram through the "fact checker's" preferred narrative and accounting of the "facts".
Yes, that's what they do. They should do this for every article in your publication.
> while adding context, references, and journalistic integrity.
No, this is editorial.
Yes. 100% it should be nobody's job to do this for you. Everyone should be doing that job for themselves. A society devolves to madness when people delegate verification of their world view to people chosen specifically for this purpose.
Since then the line between word-of-mouth and journalism has blurred. Journalists don't always fact check (or even explicitly slant their news to mislead), and word-of-mouth goes far beyond urban legends into current events. Snopes' focus isn't the news, per se, but the news as reported via social media. That is sometimes repetition of a supposedly-reliable news source being circulated, or it may require them to run down the original source.
There are now "fact checkers" who make the journalists themselves their primary target, which is both an unfortunate consequence of the way journalism has slipped standards and something that should have existed in the first place to prevent that. They're not supposed to be a Ministry of Truth, but just another source of journalism doing what journalists are supposed to do.
If a "fact checker" is themselves biased, all you can do is build up a web of trust for who is doing good work and who isn't. The good fact checkers have a history of doing it right. Which includes correcting themselves when they do it wrong.
It's the same company as BuzzFeed, and the name certainly isn't doing it any favors. But this story isn't BuzzFeed-style junk. It's actually relevant, and most likely factual.
Seems bizarre, but it's true.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is another similar org that is treated as authoritative yet has zero safeguards or unbiased processes.
I would really have to think about who is less biased, the SPLC or the ADL.
The wiki model seems alright to me. It just needs a better way to view changes.
The best defense against it is good journalism, honesty, clarity, and disclosure.
Then, when the narrative shifted to it being Russian intelligence, I never heard anything like my previous story again.
I'm really unclear what actually happened. Was that a progression of events, was it always Russian, was it never Russian?
No, it didn't. the term became popular during his campaign to describe fake Facebook and other social media posts presenting themselves as legitimate news, but spreading false information. The term itself predates Trump's campaign entirely, though.
>They were saying it in their most serious journalist voice, to imply that Trump voters were duped into voting for him.
You expect to be taken seriously with juvenile caricatures like this?
>Then shortly after it was appropriated by Trump himself, and everyone wanted to disavow the phrase, which was deeply hilarious.
Trump used it all the time to describe any media coverage he didn't like, and later Trump claimed he invented the term (he didn't.) He probably wants royalties.
If you are the secondary source, you should of course include your references. If you're the primary source (e.g. you're quoting anonymous administration officials), feel free to declare it a fact; people shouldn't just believe you, but putting your reputation on the line is actually a good signal to me (contingent on said reputation.)
To be necessarily skeptical of all things, at all times. Understand that the search for "truth" is a journey, not a destination.
It certainly isn't government sources, and it's not traditional news sources, and big technology isn't a good choice either.
Snopes used to be a pretty good place to link to dispute clearly bullshit stuff that idiots would forward around the internet as if it had any chance of being true, but at some point there was just too much of that. And they also seemed to expand their scope into things that were more nuanced and easier to get wrong.
The solution is the same as it’s always been: read multiple sources that have different viewpoints.
https://www.snopes.com/2021/08/13/snopes-writers-condemn-pla...
The most irrelevant comments always rise to the top and more and more people join in and waffle about nothing.
The interesting point in the article is this one:
"Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company."
How can the whatever whatever suspend her boss from editorial duties pending a comprehensive internal investigation? Did she clear that with her boss first?
What Covid has proved is that the whole media has become a pack of shills, which is false because they have always been pack of shills, only they were more subtle about it?
From David Mikkelson’s statement (scroll to the bottom):
> I have given full authority to our managing editor, Doreen Marchionni, to take any measures needed to address these issues.
So why didn't the boss apply his own authority to himself and announce it to the press? The whole thing is face.
Why didn't the boss simply resign himself from the role?
Anyway, aren't Snopes pages just links that Democrats post without reading as a comment under a reactionary or socialist relative's post on Facebook? Nobody is reading them, so the only thing that matters is the headline and the graphic.
Now its only really minorly credible.
My personal experience was finding an article that talked about something I was directly involved in, and it was clearly wrong. I basically lost most trust in its ratings however it does seem to basically cover the issue in text. My main quibbles are with when the article covers something substantially and then says the rating only depends on less than 10% of the article.
Snopes can only go by what other sources have written, since they weren’t there. If you have direct personal experience, it’s certainly likely that your view will differ from the one reported by Snopes, for two reasons: Firstly, your view is by definition limited and personal, and is likely skewed one way or the other. But secondly, all journalists who write about something have similar incentives (i.e. to write an interesting ‘story’), and will therefore likely all choose a similar narrative based on a similar starting point.
I should note that Wikipedia has the exact same problem, since Wikipedia must limit itself to secondary sources.
Or they could do basic journalism: directly contact sources or seek access to first hand material and do cross-refence. It used to be the standard back in the days to have at least three independent sources before publishing a story.
I have supplied information to correct articles. They were never updated. This information was easy to come by. One in particular involved timelines/history of bills in the US Congress which they were very wrong about. All you have to do is go to Congress's website and look up the history. The "fact checker" could not even bother to do this. They had a narrative to push and the were going to push it.
Snopes is garbage for anything political.
Someone who lived through something probably won't know everything, but they'll certainly know more, especially about what they experienced, than someone who wasn't involved at all.
This comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
Doesn't anybody see the irony of Buzzfeed calling out a fellow media company for using such tactics?
Buzzfeed's entire growth strategy for years was copy-pasting content from trending reddit threads and turning them into "listicles" with clickbait headlines, then feeding them into Facebook.
Was that not also plagiarism?
Every time I post a guest blog to a news site it appears on 10 other news sites within a day.
This legwork is usually done by traditionally respected publications (i.e. not just copying and pasting). Other outlets and blogs with different goals do blatantly copy and paste, which produces articles less valuable than those traditionally matched.
Matching—versus copying and pasting—is important because it avoids the spread of false reports. From "The Elements of Journalism" by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel: "Originality is a bulwark of better journalism, deeper understanding, and more accurate reporting. […] In the era before curation and aggregation, the tradition of “matching” stories was rooted in the same idea. Rather than publishing another news outlet’s scoop, journalists tended to require one of their reporters to call a source to confirm it first. This tradition of matching was a way for news organizations to avoid having to credit their rivals, which in this earlier era was considered an embarrassing admission of being scooped. Yet the tradition of matching had another more important and salutary effect. Stories that couldn’t be independently confirmed would not be repeated."
A norm in the journalism industry is to credit the first publication who reported an investigative scoop, naming the outlet (e.g. this New York Times article [0] cites information reported by less-read Punchbowl News).
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/21/us/joe-biden
That is the high-quality, professional version of matching. The low-quality, unprofessional version is echoing a story for clicks, but you're less likely to run into this if you are a newspaper subscriber who reads reports from publication apps (or alternatively, a reader who curates high-quality sources of reporting without paywalls).
The original r/AskReddit thread ("What feels illegal, but isn't?"): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/aszfh3/what_feel...
The Buzzfeed repurposing of that thread ("19 Things That FEEL Illegal Even Though They Definitely Aren't"): https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/if-you-have-a-guilty...
And a r/mildlyinfuriating thread about Buzzfeed's repurposing ("Buzzfeed blatantly copying their articles from AskReddit threads"): https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/axb6cw/b...
As the r/mildlyinfuriating discussion points out, the Buzzfeed article is both prefaced with the origin — i.e. "This week, a Reddit thread asked users that very question..." — and a link to that source. And each item (i.e. Reddit comment) is attributed to the Reddit user (e.g. "Walking out of the store without buying anything." —lassissal), and a link back to the user comment. Plagiarism is the act of claiming authorship for someone else's content. Buzzfeed's profit-by-curation may be distasteful, but it's not plagiarism.
In any case, I think the average person understands that Buzzfeed is an aggregator, with a mission to get clicks and to entertain. Stealing content is wrong no matter what, but it isn't a direct contradiction of Buzzfeed's purported core purpose. Snopes' purported core purpose is to "have the real facts", and that purpose is directly undermined by lying about others' work being your own.
If I were to publish an article that is a word for word copy of another article, with proper attribution, would I not be accused of plagiarism?
I think the lawyers of the NYT may have a different opinion about that.
The fact is, Buzzfeed was able to get away with stealing content from reddit and selling ads on it because no reddit user was ever going to hire a lawyer to sue them over it.
Also, I've certainly seen Buzzfeed content that was taken from Reddit without attribution.
It's explicitly not stealing content.
I would even call it stealing content. But plagiarism is about passing someone else's work off as yours.
But also, when you post content to Reddit, you've granted them a (non-exclusive) license to reproduce it as they please. If Reddit's okay with Buzzfeed's reprinting, then I don't think it would legally been seen as stealing either.
In any case, your objection seems to be that plagiarism and repurposing of content (legal or not) fulfills the same evil end: profit from the labor of others. Sure, I'm not necessarily arguing against that. But I'm pointing out there's an additional element to plagiarism, which is the implication of independent, original reporting. To use a screenshot from the investigative article, which shows the Reuters and the Snopes version of a Supreme Court ruling:
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2021-08/13/0...
By restating Reuters' assertions without attribution, Snopes implicitly implies that it has done the independent reporting and research (e.g. calling up the attorneys, downloading and reading the court docket). And the apparent "fact" that this Kentucky court clerk is denying licenses based on her religious beliefs becomes significantly more established "fact" when two different journalism outlets have independently confirmed it.
Snopes ostensible speciality is gathering and summarizing established facts, which includes filtering through the noise of fakery and also, redundant information. Committing plagiarism is not just immoral, but a direct attack on Snopes' reason for existence, and that what makes this situation especially notable beyond "Doesn't everyone do growth hacks?"
Citing where you took the words from doesn't make you the author of those words.
I wouldn't even have a problem if Buzzfeed had just slightly rewrote the content from reddit. Because that would involve some effort. I wouldn't even care about attribution in that case.
But doing a full copy-paste, hitting publish and then collecting money for it is just disgusting.
BuzzfeedNews is legitimate journalism, financed with the money from the clickbaity Buzzfeed.
But I agree the co-branding has its downsides.
But let's not kid ourselves that this is only online. It happens in all news media. One person breaks a story then all the other news outlets just repeat the original story sometimes with their own followup quotes.
i) the typical buzzfeed junk - Buzzfeed - This group follows no journalism practices, steals content from other sites, doesn't attribute, writes click bait articles, rebrands ads as articles, etc.
ii) the investigate journalism department - Buzzfeed News - this team has top notch investigative journalism. They actually do tons of original research, interview and cite sources, break big stories (many of the Uber scandals were found through their original research). Basically this group follows journalism standards and actually is at the top tier of investigative journalism.
The irony is that i) and ii) are run under the same brand and the only reason why Buzzfeed can fund investigate journalism ii) is due to the b.s. content they serve from i).
it's a weird scenario where the org is both the worst and best of journalism. Bu at least they have found a sustainable, albeit sleazy, way of funding investigative journalism.