> They sold their credibility for a mess of money and political activism
Can you provide any additional details, references, and/or specific examples?
I haven't used snopes in a long while, but was impressed at the time, particularly that they always sited references, exploring both sides of an issue. I always came away feeling better informed. But I'm open to changing my opinion if there is justification to do so.
>I haven't used snopes in a long while, but was impressed at the time, particularly that they always sited references, exploring both sides of an issue. I always came away feeling better informed.
There was a point that nearly any radical, strange, urban legend seeming, or truthy article that crossed my path was immediately plugged into Snopes for a fact check. Even when they ended it with a shrug I usually felt like I'd at least investigated a bit. Usually if nothing else I would get pointed towards other sources to try to nail down whether something was factual or not. Then some point around the 2016 election it seemed as though Snopes began straining at gnats to try to falsify things that they admitted were essentially true. They started to resemble Polifact.
You know the game, 'Ackchyually it's not half of all people polled, it's only 49.9% of respondents.' That kind of thing. After they poked at Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on things I knew about, having already researched them a few too many times I started writing them off. When I started seeing them as a fact checker on Facebook pulling the Polifact game too many times it became obvious they'd sold out to the political apparatus.
I linked to some of what's been going on behind the scenes above, you can choose whether or not to believe those things but you'll have to do your own research, which is ultimately what my loss of respect for Snopes taught me in the end. No matter what it is, you should do your own research and quit thinking that you can always trust the authority. If the past few years taught us anything, it ought to have taught us that.
This article said that snopes concluded [0] that it was true that the african-american lady said she was verbally assaulted and told to "go back", and that the white guy admitted swearing at her, and that the fictional/satirical Babylon article was false on where it happened and with who. In the (updated?) snopes article they said that she wasn't sure if he said the "go back" part.
I assume the problem is about whether that "go back" part was actually said, making this more of a racial issue? Snopes never passed judgement on that, it looks to me like they passed along what she said, and what he said, along with a sampling of social media comments people were making. The fact that snopes didn't include the police report or video doesn't seem terribly relevant, but maybe that's just my opinion, the video and his statements didn't look good for him. The dailywire.com article seemed to take issue with her calling him a "white man" (their scare quotes), but in the video they linked to the guy referred to himself as white and admitted initiating the confrontation and swearing at her.
I don't think that snopes misrepresented this. They were fact checking the title of the satire column that named the wrong place and the wrong person, and they labelled it as satire. What did you expect, for snopes to fact check the "go back" part and call her a liar?
In my opinion, after reading both articles and watching the video, the guy was an asshole. I understand being rubbed wrong by people who are over the limit in the express line. But he was not impacted - he was already checked out. Would he have confronted and swore at a pregnant white woman like that? If the answer is "no" then it looks like white privilege to me, and that's something that minorities say happens a lot, and it must be terribly aggravating. Did she make that up the "go back" part purpose? Hmmm, that's a pretty minor detail. He was an asshole. It was something to read some of those tweets, that it's her fault for being triggered and she should be ashamed. Wow.
These get into reports that the guy who founded snopes misused company funds after his divorce, and plagiarized from other news articles.
I don't want to say these may not be relevant, but granting they may be both 100% true I don't know that they prove one way or the other if snopes is misrepresenting things or not. They seem to try to put all the relevant facts on the table.
This was fact checking the assertion "Biden Admin Spending $30M To Give Crack Pipes, Drug Kits To Addicts For 'Advancing Racial Equity'". Snopes declared it "mostly false" then later changed to "outdated" after a statement from the administration that crack pipes would not be part of the program [1].
I thought they did a good job with this. They laid out a lot of facts, including the relevant text of the HHS document, more than I saw in the nypost.com and linked freebeacon.com articles. On the one hand safe-smoking kits were one of 20 activities targetted for the grants, and they wanted to prioritize under-served communities, but the goal of the whole program was to reduce harm and infection among drug users. They focused their true/false check on the headline "crack pipes for racial equity" and gave it a mostly false, which seems correct. It was the headline stretching the truth, not snopes.
You original assertion:
> It's Snopes. No such thing. They sold their credibility for a mess of money and political activism.
Fact check = False, your examples did not prove your point.
I agree with you about checking references for oneself. I've noticed in the past that snopes' true/false calls can be narrowly scoped, and are often not as useful as the more detailed facts. They do a good job of aggregating facts, better than most of what passes for news sources in today's world.
I'd also say that in regards to political issues many people don't seem to be interested in complicated facts any more as much as they are in feeding their existing biases and agendas one soundbite and meme at a time, not wanting to engage with anything to the contrary. Like you said, you trusted them when it came to urban myths, but stopped liking them around 2016, which coincides with when political fact checking becoming a bigger issue.
I'm curious what you think snopes should have done differently for in the two articles [0] [1] discussed? Chosen different assertions to check? Come to different conclusions? What were you expecting to see?
It's Snopes. No such thing. They sold their credibility for a mess of money and political activism. No refunds.