Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

buzzfeednews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 417 posts

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#141

Post by pessimizer »

rootusrootus wrote: post #110
ceilingcorner wrote: post #87

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.

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.

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.)

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#142

Post by slg »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #101
corndoge wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good thing. I want to see those changes. Preventing people from seeing the change log of a page because "conspiracy theorists might use it" is dangerous thinking. Saying that it's okay to forego transparency because it could be used to bolster people who disagree with you is backwards. That's precisely why transparency should be retained - when you're the person disagreeing, it benefits you.

Case in point: On Jan 6, NPR published an article with a 10AM headline and timestamp about the upcoming Trump rally. Later in the day, they changed the headline to be something like "Insurgents invade Capital building", but did not change the 10AM timestamp up top. One had to read the article to find the update timestamp. Newsmaxx, and thus many if its viewers looked at the headline and headline timestamp and trumpet…

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.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#143

Post by velcii »

SllX wrote: post #54
headmelted wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 toge…

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 receiv…

>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.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#144

Post by pembrook »

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?

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#145

Post by mavhc »

frumper wrote: post #90
majormajor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

But was never convicted, or even prosecuted, for the bombing the original tweet mentioned. And never prosecuted for terrorism.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#146

Post by unanswered »

qkqk wrote: post #109
busymom0 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-...

That was not the original lab leak article. The original article called it definitely false and racist.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#147

Post by mancerayder »

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.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#148

Post by majormajor »

strangeattractr wrote: post #93
majormajor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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?)

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#149

Post by pessimizer »

encoderer wrote: post #132
rootusrootus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Worth remembering that the term “fake news” did not exist in the mainstream until 6 years ago. It used to be called “liberal bias in the media” but fake news is a political slogan like Death Tax or Cancel Culture and like political slogans of previous generations I am optimistic we will not be stuck here forever.

"Fake news" was a phrase originating from the Clinton camp. Trump's political history has many examples of him taking Clinton's ideas that were getting a little traction and turning them on her. They were very close at one point.

The best defense against it is good journalism, honesty, clarity, and disclosure.

Re: Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name

#150

Post by spiderice »

mavhc wrote: post #133
spiderice wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The lack of evidence is your evidence?

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.
Post reply on HN