[HN Gopher] Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized article...
___________________________________________________________________
Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake
name
Author : danso
Score : 341 points
Date : 2021-08-13 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.buzzfeednews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.buzzfeednews.com)
| m0llusk wrote:
| 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?
| nsizx wrote:
| You can just omit the references and reasoning that go against
| your narrative.
| qkqk wrote:
| Remind me of their narrative again? They say that
|
| > "Trump did not explicitly tell people to 'storm' or
| 'breach' or 'break into' the [US] Capitol."
|
| and _included_ the reasoning that
|
| > the president called on supporters to "peacefully and
| patriotically" march or walk to the Capitol
|
| ...but wait, their far-left narrative! Why didn't they omit
| those references and reasoning?!
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-tell-supporters-
| stor...
| busymom0 wrote:
| 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.
| qkqk wrote:
| Snopes didn't, they reference a medical journal article
| from 1.5 years ago as evidence. Which presumably you
| agree with...oops! [1]
|
| 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-...
| busymom0 wrote:
| Since you are referring to the Capitol, here's one
| example of their bias:
|
| 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 times to point
| out the problems with their fact check, including links
| to these pictures. They never replied nor updated their
| narrative, despite it being a hot topic in the press for
| quite a while.
|
| Truth and facts are becoming harder to come by these
| days. When you have to fact check the fact checkers,
| things are pretty bad.
|
| And social media companies will use "fact checks" like
| these to make censorship decisions, so they aren't simply
| "alternative viewpoints" on the internet; they have real-
| world First Amendment implications."
|
| These are examples I easily found by using duckduckgo.
| Google will hide these.
|
| Not replying further as this discussion has turned into a
| snarky flame war which is frowned upon.
| twolong wrote:
| tl;dr
| unanswered wrote:
| That was not the original lab leak article. The original
| article called it definitely false and racist.
| qkqk wrote:
| Right, you can tell by the publication date (it's in the
| URL), why I say "they reference a medical journal article
| from 1.5 years ago as evidence."
|
| 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/
| qkqk wrote:
| 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...
| unanswered wrote:
| 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.
| spiderice wrote:
| > why didn't they omit those references and reasoning
| regarding the Capitol?!
|
| 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.
| mavhc wrote:
| The lack of evidence is your evidence?
| spiderice wrote:
| 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.
| qkqk wrote:
| > 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?
| qkqk wrote:
| > the logical fallacies are hurting my brain
|
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
| busymom0 wrote:
| 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."
|
| 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".
| psychometry wrote:
| Let me guess, you're one of those idiots who thinks that
| modifying your stance when presented with new evidence is
| bad because it's "flip-flopping"?
| farp wrote:
| Parent comment is just a rehashing of a Fox News article.
| Seeing this more often on HN.
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/media/realclearpolitics-fact-
| checker...
| busymom0 wrote:
| 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.
| farp wrote:
| > You are basically doing an hominem attack.
|
| 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 cliche even _Fox News_ already moved on to
| new talking points.
| Natsu wrote:
| 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.
| velcii wrote:
| It might be time to rename IT as MIT, stands for Mis-
| information technology, which is what it is, as of now..
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| luckylion wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But that doesn't matter, does it?
|
| 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.
| max46 wrote:
| >You can, but it will then be obvious to anyone familiar
| with the references
|
| The whole point of "fact checkers" is to be used by people
| who are not expert on the subject
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| pembrook wrote:
| 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.
|
| Was that not also plagiarism?
| jccalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| Here's an example of what you're talking about:
|
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| akiselev wrote:
| You might be accused of a copyright violation, but not
| plagiarism.
| pembrook wrote:
| 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.
| p49k wrote:
| 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.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Presumably NYT has a different EULA/TOS/Copyright
| restrictions.
|
| It's explicitly not stealing content.
| rhino369 wrote:
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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?"
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| BuzzfeedNews != Buzzfeed.
|
| BuzzfeedNews is legitimate journalism, financed with the money
| from the clickbaity Buzzfeed.
|
| But I agree the co-branding has its downsides.
| lilyball wrote:
| Buzzfeed cites its sources for its listicles. That's the exact
| opposite of plagiarism.
| pembrook wrote:
| 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.
| sdljfjafsd wrote:
| 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.
| jawns wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| Exactly, I'm not actually surprised, don't most news media just
| copy articles from each other?
|
| Every time I post a guest blog to a news site it appears on 10
| other news sites within a day.
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| 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.
| aalam wrote:
| 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).
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/21/us/joe-biden
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| Ive not ever seen the positive effects of this on internet
| journalism rather than echoing with less details and
| obfuscating actual information.
| aalam wrote:
| 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).
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| 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.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| It's well known that Snopes has a dark side. The couple that run
| it also run a network of spam servers that start many of those
| forwarded stories in the first place, ensuring they'll always
| have business.
|
| (I didn't come up with that claim, but the source of it isn't
| very popular on this site, so I'll just give its number instead
| of a URL: 250).
| S_A_P wrote:
| Fact checking all the facts is an extremely broad scope. A small
| mom and pop company is hardly able to support such a mission
| unless they happen to be multidisciplinary experts/geniuses. I
| always seemed a bit doubtful about some of the conclusions drawn
| from that site.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| The only facts they could debunk would be the truly absurd
| (e.g. that this smoothie will extend your life by a decade!)
|
| Or instances where insufficient evidence is used to draw an
| absolute conclusion.
|
| I've seen them actually commit the latter where they fact check
| a politician's prediction based on an expert projection as if
| the expert is infallible.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I'd ask for a fact check on that, but I don't need one because
| buzzfeed is a reputable, trustworthy publication.
|
| Kidding aside, this was widely known as far back as 2016 and
| discussed heavily online, but called a conspiracy theory and
| criticized by all the reputable rags that rely on fact checking
| to lie to you and convince you that you can't trust your own
| judgment. The fact that this is being reported now probably means
| someone became no longer useful, every last one of these fact
| checkers and reputable news publications are doing things like
| this daily and gaslighting their readers.
| lozaning wrote:
| Buzzfeed News != Buzzfeed. One has a pulitzer and the other
| tells you what Hogwarts house you're in.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Walter Duranty has a Pulitzer as well, the New York Times
| that he worked for when he wrote what he is known for writing
| has many.
|
| A brand is a brand and an organization is an organization. If
| they're truly that separate they wouldn't rely on the same
| brand. And besides, Buzzfeed is more reputable than Buzzfeed
| News, because the former is obvious nonsense and the latter
| pretends to be serious and honest.
| roody15 wrote:
| 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.
| CDRdude wrote:
| Can you provide an example of an article that you feel has a
| clear political slant?
| [deleted]
| h_anna_h wrote:
| What about these?
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-vaccine-passport/
| ajross wrote:
| 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?
| jccalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| mjburgess wrote:
| I agree that the first should be "YES" and the second
| "Mixed".
|
| The question is now whether you can find similar "right-
| friendly" stories that show a similar "hesitation" in the
| labelling. Probably you can.
| h_anna_h wrote:
| 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.
| jyounker wrote:
| 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."
| majormajor wrote:
| 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.
| frumper wrote:
| 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.
| mavhc wrote:
| But was never convicted, or even prosecuted, for the
| bombing the original tweet mentioned. And never
| prosecuted for terrorism.
| frumper wrote:
| By your line of thinking Timothy McVeigh is a murderer,
| but not a terrorist. Terrorism related charges changed in
| 2001.
| strangeattractr wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| 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?)
| coolHands wrote:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/refugee-invaders-meme/
|
| 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.
| eplanit wrote:
| The Southern Poverty Law Center is a sadly similar story.
| They're downright extreme nowadays.
| 1over137 wrote:
| An example being SPLC labeling ex-muslims as hateful
| "islamophobes".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| They had to pay $3.4 million and apologize for defaming a
| secular Muslim critic as an "anti-Muslim extremist":
| https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/2018/06/20/southern-
| pover...
| jaywalk wrote:
| Hey everybody, SPLC just added eplanit to their extremists
| lists. We shouldn't listen to him.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Is eplanit a disaster-capitalist or racist? That's usually
| what triggers it...
| Veen wrote:
| Which of those are Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz?
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| According to the SPLC, their addition was a mistake, and
| the retraction seems honest and reasonable. [0]
|
| Now, me, _I_ like my organizations to never admit-- uh, I
| mean make mistakes.
|
| [0] https://www.splcenter.org/splc-statement-video
| Veen wrote:
| They settled a defamation lawsuit. The settlement terms
| included an apology and payment of $3 million.
| damagednoob wrote:
| If it was an honest mistake, how did it get to the point
| of having to settle for $3 million?
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Why not try reading about it?
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maaj
| id-...
| [deleted]
| strangeattractr wrote:
| 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.
| eagsalazar2 wrote:
| 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.
| eagsalazar2 wrote:
| How so?
| namdnay wrote:
| people were saying the same thing about the SPLC when they
| were founded
| jollybean wrote:
| This unfortunately doesn't work as an argument, because
| times change.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| mancerayder wrote:
| It really highlights questions we should be asking like, if we
| accept the status of "fact checker" for some media or other
| organization, how do we ensure we fact check these fallible,
| human organizations? We're not perfect, and our ideas around
| institutional legitimacy ("this one is a fact-checker, this one
| is fake news") need to be constantly challenged.
| nsizx wrote:
| 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?
| sk2020 wrote:
| Other than the materially false statements? Gee, I guess
| nothing.
| DFHippie wrote:
| If the materially false statement is the article's byline?
| Any port in a storm, I guess, but this isn't solid reasoning.
| namdnay wrote:
| In the articles? Like what?
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| Back in the mid-1990s I had created a webpage about an exclusive
| tourist destination, which included several digitized photos I
| had taken.
|
| Snopes stole those photos for their page and never credited me,
| even after I emailed asking them to.
| kragen wrote:
| I find it really grating to see David Mikkelson described as the
| "cofounder of Snopes", because snopes is Barbara Hamel (then
| Barbara Mikkelson), his ex-wife, the well-known poster to
| alt.folklore.urban. David Mikkelson is definitely not a founder
| of Barbara Hamel, just her ex-husband. The website is named after
| her because it was her site. But at this point she has been
| unrelated to the site for several years, similar to the case of
| Ernesto and Julio Gallo.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Many prominent news organizations, including the New York
| Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed News, have acknowledged
| plagiarism in their own pages and publicly corrected the record,
| as Snopes is doing now.
|
| How does a sentence like this end up in a supposedly serious
| article? Bad editing? Does Buzzfeed own a piece of Snopes?
| RickJWagner wrote:
| Snopes is a great resource if you want truthful articles with an
| extreme political bias.
|
| I don't believe they'll ever tell an outright lie, but they'll go
| to extreme lengths to say only negative things about one side of
| the political spectrum and only positive things about the other
| side. It's an incredible way to control the narrative.
|
| The only problem I find with Snopes is that it plays strongly to
| people's biases. They'll come to think only from one side of the
| scale, universally to their detriment.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| A lot of the responses here seem to be attempting to sow Fear,
| Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) on the fact-checking articles
| themselves (which were not in any way implicated by the
| revelations of this article). As if there is some kind of
| "essence" that permeates an orgainization which either wholly
| condemns it or wholly justifies it. I reject this assessment.
| Every article stands or falls on its own.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| When we call some information source "reputable" we are saying
| that we are relying on their reputation of having integrity so
| as to not have to dig into every detail of everything
| ourselves. Every article linked on godlike productions stands
| on it's own as well by this logic. If we go by this logic there
| is no reputable or disreputable organization, there are only
| articles. Of course that defeats the whole purpose of branding
| your organization, so even in this case there is no reason to
| trust Snopes or any other fact checker, there's no reason for
| fact checking because you have to fact check the fact checks
| yourself as every article stands on it's own.
|
| But of course that's not how it works. We rely on brands like
| Snopes because we trust them, because we view them as having a
| reputation of integrity. So it isn't fud to point out that
| there are shameless bald faced liars without an ounce of
| integrity at all running the organization.
| least wrote:
| Sort of. In a vacuum it can certainly function that way, but
| people in reality don't necessarily have the time to distill
| pure water from poisoned wells, especially when there's a well
| that is reputably pure right next to it.
|
| That being said, I think that buzzfeed news has actually earned
| a reputation of producing some good journalism despite it being
| an offshoot of Buzzfeed. Simply the irony is not lost on these
| people.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2017/07/26/539576135/fact-checking-websi...
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| mzs wrote:
| 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.
| jjcon wrote:
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| 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.
| soheil wrote:
| 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.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| 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".
| [deleted]
| paulpauper wrote:
| false attribution is worse than no attribution
|
| He was taking ownership of work which was not his and profiting
| from it with ads and facebook traffic.
| jaywalk wrote:
| 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.
| DFHippie wrote:
| 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.
| jjcon wrote:
| And what about AP and Reuters?
| DFHippie wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| technothrasher wrote:
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| AP and Reuters are wire services, and other news orgs pay a
| large fee to syndicate their content
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| My local paper dropped AP, but now runs CNN as their
| primary source. It has been... pretty obvious.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| 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
| goatforce5 wrote:
| I think it's fairly common to take a wire article and
| change/update it with original reporting.
|
| 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"
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Oh, Luke Harding.
|
| 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.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| namdnay wrote:
| 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
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| 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.
| meowface wrote:
| 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.
| ruined wrote:
| 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
| underseacables wrote:
| Snopes lost credibility when they teamed up with Facebook
| rvz wrote:
| And any 'news' outlet that has cited Snopes was also probably
| spreading questionable information.
|
| But very unsurprising to see this from the already biased 'fact
| checkers'.
| nradov wrote:
| Snopes lost credibility when they "fact checked" the Babylon
| Bee, a site which is clearly labeled as satire and never
| claimed to be real news.
|
| https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/31/fact-c...
| jnwatson wrote:
| 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".
| Borgz wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| Snopes altered those pages when they got called out for it.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| 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.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > 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...
| [deleted]
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Part of that was prompted by certain segments sharing Babylon
| Bee's posts unironically.
| nostromo wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-
| wemple/wp/2018/03/...
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I think they lost credibility long before that, honestly...
| charbonneau wrote:
| Relentlessly resourceful, am I right? -\\_(tsu)_/-
| at_a_remove wrote:
| It seems my basic fear of anyone slapping on a white hat and
| saying that they are one of the good guys is once again
| vindicated.
| undecisive wrote:
| 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...
| lolc wrote:
| What do you make of the statement published on snopes.com
| itself?
|
| https://www.snopes.com/2021/08/13/snopes-writers-condemn-pla...
| kirillzubovsky wrote:
| Now if the chief fact checker could lie to the people he serves,
| just imagine who else could lie to the people ...
| DudeInBasement wrote:
| Fact check: TRUE
| mherdeg wrote:
| Yeah I don't trust Mikkelson's writing very much because of this
| Snopes article: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-
| spiders/ (mentioned in the article).
|
| It's not in the special section of their site marking it as
| satire or anything but it cites a nonexistent source ("Lisa
| Birgit Holst", anagram for "this is a big troll").
|
| The weird thing is that ... as far as I could tell the real
| origin of the "people eat eight spiders a year" thing was a 1992
| campus humor column ( some notes at
| https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/80j3px/til_a...
| ). That would have been a perfectly fine story to write and I'm
| not sure why he just made something up instead, except as some
| kind of quiet prank.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I remember being freaked out as a kid in the 1970's at the "you
| eat spiders while you sleep" urban legend, so it predates that
| 1992 humor column by _at least_ 15 years or so.
| bifrost wrote:
| 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.
| evgen wrote:
| 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.
| nitrogen wrote:
| 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.
|
| This comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cri
| chton#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._
| teddyh wrote:
| > _My personal experience was finding an article that talked
| about something I was directly involved in, and it was clearly
| wrong._
|
| Snopes can only go by what other sources have written, since
| they weren't there. If you have direct personal experience,
| it's certainly likely that your view will differ from the one
| reported by Snopes, for two reasons: Firstly, your view is by
| definition limited and personal, and is likely skewed one way
| or the other. But secondly, all journalists who write about
| something have similar incentives (i.e. to write an interesting
| 'story'), and will therefore likely all choose a similar
| narrative based on a similar starting point.
|
| I should note that Wikipedia has the exact same problem, since
| Wikipedia must limit itself to secondary sources.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > 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.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Snopes is garbage for anything political.
| [deleted]
| TeeMassive wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
| bbarnett wrote:
| I just checked on snopes, this is false.
| DFHippie wrote:
| 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.
| Veen wrote:
| It's misleading if it implies the plagiariser witnessed,
| researched, or analyzed an event, when all he did was copy
| someone else who did those things.
| DFHippie wrote:
| Well, if the credibility of the content depends on its having
| been witnessed or analyzed at all, this should be immaterial.
| TimPC wrote:
| The biggest problem with Snopes is their unwillingness to rate
| something as opinion rather than fact. As a result they assign
| truth ratings to things that are mostly opinion pieces and those
| truth ratings are often accusing the opinion piece of making
| something up. The opinions in said pieces may or may not be well
| supported by facts but they are still opinions and calling one
| false is misleading at best and dangerous at worse. Especially
| when you have become a source for social media censorship.
| eagsalazar2 wrote:
| Can you provide a link to an article you feel is especially
| illustrative of this problem?
| TimPC wrote:
| I'd rather focus on the broader claim that the right set of
| answers for fact checking is {True, False, Opinion} the get
| bogged down in the specifics of the exactly correct
| boundaries between these categories, which has some
| subjectivity and is likely to become the main topic of
| discussion if any example is provided.
| TimPC wrote:
| I also think the right thing to do is pull out individual
| claims in articles and rate the claims rather than trying to
| rate the article as a whole. There are a few edge cases where
| entirely true facts are put together in misleading ways that
| might get assigned higher than ideal truth ratings in this
| construction but I think it does far better than trying to
| rate articles as a whole which confuses the matter entirely
| and introduces a lot more subjectivity.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I gave couple examples here. It's a long comment so I don't
| want to repost:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173312
| bobthechef wrote:
| 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".
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| argomo wrote:
| 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?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Fact checkers reconcile memes/news media against primary
| sources/other news media
|
| Yes, that's what they do. They should do this for every
| article in your publication.
|
| > while adding context, references, and journalistic
| integrity.
|
| No, this is editorial.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| 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.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| > ...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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I really want to like Snopes, but I'm not convinced that they
| weigh evidence correctly. For example, they debunked the myth
| that Marilyn Monroe had 6 toes. First, _I don 't believe that she
| did_. Or even care, for that matter. But at the time, one of
| their "facts" was that if she'd had a toe removed, she'd
| basically have to learn to walk all over again because it would
| throw her balance completely off. (Note: the article no longer
| includes this fact. It did at one time, though.)
|
| However, my wife's a podiatrist. Part of her job is amputating
| parts of feet when they're damaged or infected beyond repair. I
| asked her what it's like for an otherwise healthy adult to
| recover from a pinky toe amputation, and she said it's basically
| a matter of waiting for the wound site to heal and then they
| continue with life as normal. Contrary to popular belief, even a
| big toe amputation isn't that disruptive. A vestigial 6th toe
| hanging off to the side? You'd never notice it was gone.
|
| I emailed Snopes and said hey, while I agree with your
| conclusion, this particular supporting fact is invalid according
| to an expert in the field. They replied basically that I was an
| idiot for believing she had 6 toes, and they left the article as-
| is.
|
| That's not at all what I thought, and I actually agreed with
| their conclusion. I just didn't like that they were using
| incorrect facts to support it, and especially didn't like that
| they reacted poorly to a well-meant correction.
|
| Since then, I've been skeptical of Snopes. Although I think
| they're probably right most of the time, that left a bad taste in
| my mouth. Are other people sending them corrections about their
| own fields of expertise and having them rejected? I have no way
| of knowing.
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| A coworker of mine had his big toe amputated after it was
| crushed while moving a refrigerator. Afterwards he had no
| problems and remained very athletic.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| This comment makes me queasy.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| My mother chopped off the toe next to her big toe with our
| lawnmower (accidentally.)
|
| To this day none of us can figure out how it hit that toe
| and not the big toe.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Yep. I mean, obviously you don't _want_ that to happen, but
| it 's something you can make a complete recovery from.
| intellix wrote:
| Who replied at snopes and who did you speak to?
| kstrauser wrote:
| It was like 20 years ago and I just tried to find the email
| but wasn't able to. I _think_ it was Barbara, but honestly
| don't remember.
| starkd wrote:
| Also, vestigial toes are usually removed in infancy, or sooner
| rather than later. If you wait too long, they have a harder
| times getting shoes to fit.
| samstave wrote:
| FUCK SNOPES
|
| ---
|
| They are literally FAKE NEWS and they are actively paid to push
| narratives.
|
| Utter douchebags.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Now _that 's_ an extraordinary claim. My story was meant to
| explain why I think they're fallible, but I also believe they
| have good intentions and are trying to do an accurate job of
| it. I don't see any reason to think they're getting paid to
| lie about stuff.
| xqyf wrote:
| Surely there's a horrible subreddit for you to secrete hot
| takes like "literally FAKE NEWS" on instead of this forum?
| xorcist wrote:
| Always take skeptics with a grain of salt.
| ypcx wrote:
| > I really want to like Snopes
|
| Herein lies the archetypical problem with the vanilla HN (or
| should I say "mainstream") crowd conformist mentality. As a
| human herd animal, we want to belong, but it's not okay to
| forgo our critical thinking to do so. Downvote away.
| j_m_b wrote:
| At one time, Snopes was part of the fact-checking team at
| Facebook. This comment goes to show that having an arbiter of
| truth is a bad idea considering it's hard to accurately know
| everything. Imagine Doctors trying to debunk the official fact-
| checker statements and being labeled as misinformation simply
| due to the fact that they disagree with the fact-checker!
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| Fact-checking is a dead end, a poor substitute for
| development of critical thinking skills in the broader
| population. It may be more challenging, but that's what we
| need to start working towards.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| But, even critical thinking ability relies on good inputs.
| There must be some baseline of facts to work with.
|
| I do agree however that fact-checking is extremely
| challenging, but for different reasons. That is, in a
| society that is being programmed to choose the
| reality/truth they prefer, you'll end up with cult-like
| belief systems that no amount of fact-checking will break
| through.
| exporectomy wrote:
| You can do a lot with thought experiments that show
| logical inconsistencies in ideas without any actual
| knowledge of the facts.
|
| Physics is a fairly clear example. It's hard to make all
| those equations work without creating paradoxes unless
| they actually model the real world correctly. If it was
| all fake but internally consistent, then even a small
| amount of observation could destroy the whole thing.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _You can do a lot with thought experiments that show
| logical inconsistencies in ideas without any actual
| knowledge of the facts_
|
| Yes, what you're getting at there is "a priori" knowledge
| in epistemological-speak and I agree that it forms the
| basis for much of what we consider true.
|
| But, even the ability to accurately conduct and assess
| the results of those experiments relies on _some_ set of
| facts. Your physics example speaks to exactly that: i.e.
| there 's a foundation of "rules" that underpins the
| field, much of which have been developed through rigorous
| observation, experimentation, mathematical proof, etc.
| These rules form the "accepted truths" through which we
| are able to think critically about new ideas.
|
| So, while we can debate degree, it should be clear that
| there has to be _some_ accepted base reality to make
| sense of anything. And, of course, in this thread
| analogies to science are a bit of a digression. That is,
| the topic is fact-checking sites, which are largely about
| dispelling disinformation /misinformation of the
| social/political variety. So, for instance, whether x
| politician did or did not do something can be important
| to know when trying to critically assess their fitness.
| javert wrote:
| For a critical thinker, the baseline facts come from the
| person's own direct experience. They _have_ to.
|
| For example, I probably wouldn't 100% believe that
| hundreds of people can cross the sky in a metal tube
| (i.e., modern jet airplane) if I had only been told about
| it. But I've seen it myself.
|
| Another example: I've learned enough about technology to
| think the moon landings were feasible, and I've learned
| enough about society to think that a successful
| conspiracy around the moon landings is implausible. So I
| believe the moon landings happened.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _For example, I probably wouldn 't 100% believe that
| hundreds of people can cross the sky in a metal tube
| (i.e., modern jet airplane) if I had only been told about
| it. But I've seen it myself._
|
| By that reasoning, all the people who deny the moon
| landings happened are completely logical, no? And there
| should be a lot more of them, right? Hell, _I 've_ never
| even seen a rocket take off (outside of video
| broadcasts), let alone seen spacecraft in flight, so I
| shouldn't believe in the moon landings either, right?
| javert wrote:
| My explanation was incomplete, to make for a good and
| clear example.
|
| If I hadn't seen airplanes and flown in them, I'd still
| be open to believing they exist. My belief would depend
| on what other evidence there is (broadly speaking), as in
| my example of the moon landings.
|
| It's easier to make a strong judgment about the existence
| of airplanes, than about the moon landings. I'd argue
| that most things in life are more like airplanes in that
| regard.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Won't relying on direct experience as a basis for
| critical thinking lead to all kinds of problems due to
| faulty perception and cognitive biases that we all share?
| Additionally, how are we to evaluate situations were are
| not likely to have any experience with? None of us have
| any experience with, say, the big bang or anything close
| to what the universe was like then, but can't we still
| come to many likely conclusions about it without any even
| indirect experience?
|
| So doesn't critical thinking in fact have to have a
| baseline in something other than one's own direct
| experience? Rationality, possibly?
| javert wrote:
| Rationality is a process, but it has to have data to work
| with. That data comes from perception of the world
| (sight, hearing, etc.). There is no such thing as "pure"
| rationality without sense data to work with.
|
| Evidence for the big bang ultimately comes from sense
| data. You have to integrate a lot of sense data into
| scientific theories, which then are integrated with other
| scientific theories, and so on. Science has gotten so far
| - but it all started out with simple experiments,
| eventually microscopes and weak telescopes, etc. and
| built from there.
|
| Critical thinking allows you to overcome cognitive
| biases. Faulty perception is pretty easy to detect. A
| stick in a glass of water will look bent, but it's easy
| to figure out that it actually isn't bent.
| exporectomy wrote:
| You should have multiple independent types of
| observation. If you only know about the metal tube idea
| from flying in one yourself, it might have been a
| simulation. You should have other facts that also support
| the same conclusion (eg. knowledge of aerodynamics,
| people quickly moving around the world, etc.) so that it
| would be hard for them all to be wrong in the same way.
| You don't have to witness it with your own eyes because,
| again, it would be hard for them all to create the same
| consistent lie from multiple perspectives even if they
| were conspiring.
| javert wrote:
| I agree with that, yes.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Fact-checking is a dead end, a poor substitute for
| development of critical thinking skills in the broader
| population. It may be more challenging, but that's what we
| need to start working towards.
|
| Pretty sure that work was started _thousands_ of years ago.
|
| Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. IMHO,
| insisting the only solution is to increase "critical
| thinking" to unheard of levels is wishful thinking that
| mainly serves to shoot down necessary mitigations for the
| psychological and social failings of individuals and
| communities. Fact checking isn't a perfect institution, but
| _nothing is_.
| ralph84 wrote:
| Has there ever been a time in history when those in power
| desired critical thinking skills in the broader population?
| Those in power want a compliant population, not a
| questioning one.
| richk449 wrote:
| I'm curious what you mean by this. Assuming you are
| American, do you think that Obama or Trump or Biden wish
| that the population was more compliant, and had weaker
| critical thinking? Why would that benefit them?
|
| Most leaders think they are right, and I would think they
| would want enhanced critical thinking in the population
| so that the people would better appreciate the leaders
| rightness.
| hobs wrote:
| That's so far from the truth it is comical - populism is
| literally appealing to the base and stupid indistinct and
| creating an environment hostile to intellectual
| thinking... and it's been kind of a big thing the last
| 100 years...
| rustyminnow wrote:
| Sure, the President of the United States holds an office
| with a lot of executive power, but there are plenty of
| other people with other forms of power that would have an
| interest in a compliant population.
|
| I hate to beat the "evil-zillionaire" drum, but if you
| made your fortunes selling people juice-boxes they don't
| really need, you'd prefer it if they complicitly buy all
| the junk your ads tell them to buy instead of critically
| thinking "maybe I DON'T need another one"
|
| Take also cult-leaders for example (or other con-men in
| power/leadership positions). If their followers possessed
| the critical thinking skills to see through their
| manipulations, they wouldn't have any followers.
| Complacency in this case is fundamental
| richk449 wrote:
| Okay, sure, cult leaders and juice box company executives
| don't want critical thinking in the populace. I guess
| those aren't who I think of when I think of the powerful.
| michaelt wrote:
| Every politician wants voters to see through _the other
| guy 's_ propaganda.
|
| And if voters pick up critical thinking skills as a side-
| effect of education that will get them high-paying jobs,
| what's not to like?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Imagine Doctors trying to debunk the official fact-checker
| statements and being labeled as misinformation simply due to
| the fact that they disagree with the fact-checker!
|
| Though it's worth noting that MDs (and all other kinds of
| doctors) can be incompetent and/or batshit insane.
|
| For instance, I had the pleasure of viewing a video where a
| _psychiatrist_ leaned on his MD credential to "debunk" COVID
| and the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. Even ignoring his
| personal competency, I wouldn't be surprised if his specialty
| has the _least_ qualification to speak on the topic of
| infectious disease of all medical specialties. Here 's the
| video for anyone interested: https://off-
| guardian.org/2020/12/09/watch-ask-the-experts-co..., the guy
| I'm talking about is the first speaker (didn't bother with
| any of the others).
|
| Edit: watching a bit more of that video, many of the other
| speakers emphasize being "medical doctors" and several use
| the odd phrase "medical pandemic." I wonder if they're
| reading from a script?
| jeffbee wrote:
| The whole COVID "skeptic" circus is full of quacks with
| irrelevant credentials, like urologists and orthodontists.
| As a prominent example, I give you Rand Paul. If you take
| advice on infectious diseases from an ophthalmologist,
| you're going to have a bad time.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| My ophthalmologist requires masks and social distancing
| in his office. He also recommended against wearing
| contacts for the duration of the pandemic (he says
| glasses offer more protection.)
|
| Why am I going to have a bad time for following his rules
| and advice?
| jeffbee wrote:
| If your podiatrist says the earth is round, and you
| agree, you are not taking advice in cosmology from a
| podiatrist. But if your podiatrist tells you the earth is
| flat, and you believe that, then you are. See the
| difference?
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> If you take advice on infectious diseases from an
| ophthalmologist, you're going to have a bad time.
|
| > Why am I going to have a bad time for following his
| rules and advice?
|
| You're not, you're just being over-literal. Most
| ophthalmologists are sensible people who will give
| guidance outside their fields that comports with the
| guidance from medical professionals in that field. That
| sounds like your ophthalmologist. However, if you find an
| ophthalmologist who blatantly contradicts the guidance
| from areas far outside his field, then that's when
| "you're going to have a bad time." The reason for that is
| you've likely found someone who doesn't respect the
| limits of his own knowledge and experience.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| > "debunk" COVID and the efficacy and safety of the vaccine
|
| What evidence is there of the efficacy of the vaccine that
| isn't provided directly from Pfizer/Moderna?
|
| What evidence is there that it is safe, when there are 0
| mid-to-long term studies on the effects of it? If it safe
| why are the pharma company's immune from all liability?
|
| Why is anyone that question the narrative on how safe and
| effective the vaccines immediately labeled a "quack", "alt
| right", or "anti-vax" (there are plenty of pro-vax people
| that are skeptical of THIS vax, not all vax).
| ffggvv wrote:
| snopes is basically just a few skeptical people using google.
| they arent some world class expert geniuses in all topics like
| they claim to be.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Snopes' fact checking is a meme at this point.
|
| They fact-check opinions they have re-framed in their own
| language as opposed to fact-checking the facts the opinion is
| based on. (Claim: the economy is way better: Truth: no, it's
| only 5%)
|
| They often reframe the claims to add a detail the author never
| said. (Did John ate ice cream on Sunday? No, he ate it at
| Saturday 23:35).
|
| The worst is when they rely on cherry-picked experts or
| anonymous sources: (we asked an ex-CIA analyst if the leaks are
| true, he said it's most likely not, trust us as we trust him)
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think Snopes has pretty clear political biases that detract
| from their ability to fact check. An example is their article
| on "Sweden is the rape Capitol of Europe"[1] which they rate
| false. Their article talks about Trump and immigration and
| Farrage and doesn't really get to what they are supposed to be
| debunking, which is the rape Capitol thing.
|
| Sweden does have the highest rate of rape per capita in Europe.
| This is possibly due to how Sweden and other European countries
| collate rape statistics but also possibly due to Sweden having
| more rapists or some combination of the two things.
|
| I think an article that tried to investigate how to compare
| rape rates between European countries and where we should
| fairly consider to Sweden to be in that ranking would be both
| challenging to write and interesting to read. Instead, Snopes
| just says Trump is a dumb racist and therefore the claim is
| false.
| millzlane wrote:
| Rapes actually dropped. They debunked it in the article.
| Sweden doesn't have the highest rape rate. If you look at the
| graph that they mention from the article.
| https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2017/03/sd-graph.jpg
|
| "- The question posed on sexual crimes in NTU includes a wide
| range of crimes. It can range from minor events [like]
| flashing and groping, to very serious incidents of rape.
| Those who say they suffered must therefore answer questions
| about the severity of the crime. The responses show that in
| 29 percent of cases [have been] a more serious form of sexual
| crimes, says Emelie Hambrook, investigator at the National
| Council."
|
| "While Bra noted that the broad category of "sexual crimes"
| had increased since 2012, the same was not true for rape.
| Another Bra graph shows that reported cases of rape
| (represented by the purple line below) did not spike suddenly
| after the influx of refugees in 2015 - instead, they dropped
| from 6,697 in 2014 to 5,918 in 2015 (about the same amount as
| in 2009). "
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/crime-sweden-rape-
| capital-...
| exporectomy wrote:
| Nothing you wrote contradicts the claim of it being the
| rape capital. The rate can drop and still be the highest.
| Are you aware that you're not logically countering the
| parent comment but just saying something tangential to it?
| incrudible wrote:
| That is basically how a fact check works if the claim is
| true but you want to debunk it anyway. Talk about
| something related that is directionally opposite to the
| claim, then give the \misleading\ verdict.
| anchpop wrote:
| True but the actual snopes article does directly make an
| argument that the rate of rape in sweden is not
| materially higher than in other european countries
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| This reminds me of one I saw shortly after 9/11. The rumor was
| that bin Laden hated the US because an American woman had made
| fun of his penis. I believe this even less than the Marilyn
| Monroe toe story, but the Snopes "debunking" was that bin Laden
| had never been to America so it couldn't possibly be true -
| ignoring the fact that Americans leave the country sometimes. I
| was pretty unimpressed by the slapdash effort.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't see how hearsay evidence could ever be debunked. And
| even if a recording could be found of him saying that, he
| could always just say he was joking.
| bartread wrote:
| > I don't see how hearsay evidence could ever be debunked.
|
| Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Hearsay doesn't reach the
| necessary standard to be considered evidence in the first
| place in sensible forums, including most courts.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| Yes. But the other thing is debunking rumors is the task
| they set for themselves. And in these cases, they went
| for the dopamine hit of writing "FALSE" over the
| eternally annoying "Unconfirmed".
| SerLava wrote:
| Snopes is run by the Poster's Poster.
|
| Of course they aggressively missed your point and accused you
| of being the idiot.
| colpabar wrote:
| Had you checked the article after this encounter? I guess they
| eventually realized you were right and made the change, but I
| wonder when that happened. Other comments here discuss how it's
| odd that they don't allow their site to be archived, and it's
| interesting to see a real example that illustrates why they may
| not want that.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Silent edits seem like a huge red flag that your platform
| isn't trustworthy.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I have no idea when or why they changed it. Every few years
| I'd get a bee in my bonnet to check, and this is the first
| time I remember not seeing the incorrect fact being there.
| gowld wrote:
| They also did a faux-debunking of the Trudeau-Castro theory,
| that didn't even check Justin Trudeau's mother's Wikipedia page
| to find out her location on the date they calculated for the
| conception date.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Trudeau
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/justin-trudeau-is-fidel-ca...
| moolcool wrote:
| This article is ironic coming from Buzzfeed
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
|
| Seems bizarre, but it's true.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| buzzfeednews is a different thing entirely than buzzfeed
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Diet Coke has literally nothing at all to do with Coca Cola
| whatsoever.
| danso wrote:
| > _Marchionni is reevaluating decisions Mikkelson made years
| earlier to not allow Snopes stories to be archived on the Wayback
| Machine and is empowered to make any changes necessary._
|
| Not the most immediate important thing, but hiding content from
| the Wayback Machine that is purported to be factual record is
| very problematic, to say the least
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I'm still struggling to understand why they'd want to block
| that.
|
| Edit: on re-reading I realize it's so that they don't get
| caught for this plagiarism since their modus operandi was
| plagiarize first rewrite slowly.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| 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.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| 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.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >plagiarize first rewrite slowly
|
| 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
| gmadsen wrote:
| to the non expert ear, Get Free sounds much much more
| similar to Creep, than Creep does to "The Air that I
| Breathe"
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| 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.
| jaywalk wrote:
| So they can silently change stuff without the ability for
| someone to go back and look at what it used to say.
| headmelted wrote:
| 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.
| NotChina wrote:
| 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.
| SllX wrote:
| 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.
| velcii wrote:
| >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.
|
| So it is not only them. It is you as well.
| SllX wrote:
| 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_.
|
| Good faith and honesty can take you far.
| corndoge wrote:
| 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.
| headmelted wrote:
| Totally agree. If someone's hell bent on seeing
| conspiracies they're going to see them everywhere. Better
| to be transparent.
|
| Just saying I can see how you could rationalise this
| decision, even if it's a terrible idea.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| 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.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| This isn't any different than Wikipedia. If the news
| article was more like a Wiki (with revision history),
| would that be sufficient for you?
| kortilla wrote:
| 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).
|
| If they want to be an encyclopedia then be one.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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.
| colpabar wrote:
| >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.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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).
| filoleg wrote:
| > 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).
| klipklop wrote:
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| a_conservative wrote:
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| >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.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://bit.ly/3xEpCGA
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _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.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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.
| weimerica wrote:
| 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.
| jaywalk wrote:
| That's 100% standard practice for any reputable news
| organization.
| weimerica wrote:
| Sadly, many an erstwhile reputable organization have
| devolved to engage in this practice.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Conspiracists (and many others) disregard Snopes out of
| hand, so I highly doubt that was part of their thinking.
| NotChina wrote:
| The MOT, may it always be right. But my MOT right, or
| wrong.
| bigodbiel wrote:
| 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.
| ArthurChive wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
| rglover wrote:
| Because they're a sham fact checking website and they don't
| want a paper trail.
| dfee wrote:
| 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.
| qkqk wrote:
| Really? So you think Trump was wearing his pants
| backwards at this rally?
|
| 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!
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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.
| TheTester wrote:
| Bias is definitely not the same the same as actually
| lying and even though snipes lies every once in a while
| it is mostly just biased
| [deleted]
| stimpson_j_cat wrote:
| > I see Snopes as pure, unadulterated bias
|
| 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?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| >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.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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.
| qkqk wrote:
| 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...
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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.
| JCVI-syn10 wrote:
| They debunked the video that purported to show Trump
| insulting his supporters. They said the video was fake.
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-video-insulting-
| supp...
|
| According to you, they are wrong, though. Ignore evidence
| to the contrary.
| rglover wrote:
| Because people believe what they want to believe.
|
| 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.c
| o.uk/news/article-4042194/Facebook-fa....
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Downvoting you for complaining about downvoting
|
| And also for linking the daily mail
| rglover wrote:
| I'm not complaining, just pointing it out. Enjoy your
| passive aggression.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| > _I see Snopes as pure, unadulterated bias_
|
| Could you please elaborate? I have never seen them
| described like this.
| TylerE wrote:
| I see it all the time... on the sorts of subreddits all
| the RWNJs hang out on.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Here's an example Snopes article questioning the
| authenticity of the photos on Hunter's Biden Laptop.
|
| 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/a
| rticle-9881213/Unearthed-v...
| qkqk wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-tell-supporters-
| stor...
|
| I'm so confused!
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| Engage with the given example, which proves the claim.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| 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.
| daenz wrote:
| 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.
| NotChina wrote:
| So that their stated facts are not held to a consistent
| expectation.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| 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.
| slig wrote:
| "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the
| present controls the past."
| gruez wrote:
| "We were always at war with eastasia"
| js290 wrote:
| 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...
|
| The Facts are True, the News is Fake
| https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa...
| vfclists wrote:
| 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?
| latexr wrote:
| > 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.
| h_anna_h wrote:
| Previously about Snopes:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516283
| gruez wrote:
| >foodbabe.com
|
| Seriously? The same foodbabe that said "subway bread was made
| of yoga mats"?
| h_anna_h wrote:
| I am not a fan of the site but this specific article seemed
| substantiated to me.
|
| That being said I decided to remove it because it was linked
| in the linked post tree by beerandt.
| brightball wrote:
| If you've ever gone deep on a controversial topic trying to trace
| the references that Snopes uses, this won't surprise you at all.
|
| https://babylonbee.com/news/concerning-survey-finds-too-many...
| balozi wrote:
| Snopes will probably rate the Buzzfeed claims as "False but
| Factual"
| pessimizer wrote:
| Literally true but misleading, 4/5 Pinocchios.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Outsourcing reality checks to private organizations is a serious
| problem with 21st century America.
|
| The Southern Poverty Law Center is another similar org that is
| treated as authoritative yet has zero safeguards or unbiased
| processes.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| The Department of Truth would most certainly be worse.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| What is your solution? Every single source of news, every last
| one, will have perhaps 1/3 or more of the population calling it
| fake news.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Anything that isn't a large donor-funded private organization
| would be an improvement.
|
| The wiki model seems alright to me. It just needs a better
| way to view changes.
| encoderer wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| "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.
| pram wrote:
| "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.
| [deleted]
| krapp wrote:
| >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.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >What is your solution?
|
| To be necessarily skeptical of all things, at all times.
| Understand that the search for "truth" is a journey, not a
| destination.
| __s wrote:
| CSPAN has less than 1/3
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.)
| comrh wrote:
| Newspapers have been a thing for hundreds of years
| toast0 wrote:
| Who/what is the propery authority on reality?
|
| 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.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| So if there is no clear authority on reality, that means that
| a single private site is? How does that argument make any
| sense?
|
| The solution is the same as it's always been: read multiple
| sources that have different viewpoints.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| PayPal is pretty embedded in the institutional power matrix,
| so it's not really that surprising. They want to be a bank,
| if they aren't already one.
| shadilay wrote:
| They want to be as much like a bank as possible but without
| any of the regulation.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| To me the biggest promise of cryptocurrency is the hope of an
| "uncensorable" form of commerce.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I enjoy the irony of one internet news site, criticizing,
| accurately, one of the original "internet" news sites.
|
| While both had a shaky past, how buzzfeed went from "take this
| quiz to discover which disney princess are you" to taking down an
| snopes expose is fantastic.
| ericcholis wrote:
| Oh my, the "own the libs" die hards are going to love this
| imwillofficial wrote:
| How many mainstream news sources used snopes as a reliable
| source?
| NotChina wrote:
| The down voting really shows a dislove of the truth.
| nowWut88 wrote:
| So now what?
|
| The information is out there. Do we hold journalism accountable?
|
| Do we change social rules?
|
| Do we trust Snopes?
|
| What's the value of this information other than gossip?
|
| Does it improve our scientific understanding of anything? Or just
| reiterate how useless 24/7 information cycles are?
|
| I'm being sincere; constant scandal over... nothing burgers.
|
| Meanwhile, the environment is burning up in part due to the
| systems we cobble together to distribute nonsense.
|
| I struggle with the point of this culture. This is the equivalent
| of a paranoid neighbor peeking through the blinds and grunting
| nonsense in their house about their neighbors.
|
| Such high standards, HN
| cupcake-unicorn wrote:
| Was really sickened by some of the political stuff I saw on
| Snopes, like this one, which reads almost like it's from the
| Onion: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-no-empathy/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-13 23:01 UTC)