How Snopes Made Fake News a Thing

How Fact Checking Websites Give Fake News a Voice

Over fifteen years ago MythBuster viewers were riveted by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman’s ability to use science to determine the veracity of various myths, urban legends, rumors, movie scenes, internet memes, and news stories. The duo would typically analyze the various news reports of a particular myth and then use the scientific method to determine if the reports were true. In some cases they would determine a particular myth to be “busted” or untrue, “confirmed” or true, or “plausible”. The program was a huge hit and continues today on the Science channel with a new cast.

Around the same time MythBusters aired the founders of the popular urban legend website, Snopes, attempted to launch a competing program without much success. Unlike MythBusters their model was to simply use the internet to determine if something was true or not. Ironically, Snopes was considered the best online source for determine the truth about various urban legends and myths. Snopes simply relied on reports published by others to pass judgement. The founders of Snopes would scour the internet for “evidence” from other online publications and if they could find sufficient support for a particular urban legend they would rate the legend as “true”. Snopes did not do any independent investigative journalism or scientific testing. Of course, the stakes were pretty low when you’re talking about Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. Struggling to generate income from their traffic Snopes made a huge pivot in 2014 and the stakes got a LOT bigger.

The husband-wife founders of Snopes had stopped contributing the website and eventually divorced in 2014. Afterward David Mikkelson bought out his wife and hired a full-time team of employees to pivot from debunking urban legends to “fact checking” politicians using the same methods he and his wife had used previously. The new editors of Snopes did not engage in any sort of investigative journalism, but instead relied exclusively on the work of other reporters, journalists, and opinion writers to determine if a politician was being truthful or accurate. The site’s popularity and revenue increased exponentially — from 3 million to 20 million visitors.

Around this same time the Russian backed Internet Research Agency launched and began publishing original journalism designed to be consumed by fact checking websites like Snopes and Politifact. The Russians realized that the very sites that MILLIONS of Americans relied on to determine the “truth” were vulnerable to fake news — fake news they would then give credence too by citing it as “proof” that something was either true or false. Worse yet, even if Snopes didn’t cite the original source of the fake news they would cite another journalist or source that relied on the fake news generated by IRA further obscuring its source.

It is time to put source-based fact checking websites like Snopes and Politifact out of business. We need more news sources with editorial oversight who follow standard journalistic procedures and do original reporting. The Russians are getting better and better at creating fake news — with Facebook now creating partnerships with the “fact checkers” like Snopes it is even more important than ever. Before Facebook leveraged Snopes, readers could use their own judgement to determine the veracity of a particular story. They could go to Snopes and make up their own mind — if Snope’s opinion was based on faulty or biased sourced the reader could take that into account and make up their own mind. Today Facebook simply asks Snopes for their opinion and censors the positions Snopes doesn’t agree with.