Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by busymom0 » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 7:06 PM UTC

kmeisthax wrote: post #181

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.

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", th…

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".

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

#262

Post by TeeMassive » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 7:06 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #164

bifrost wrote: post #128

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 su…

> 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 likel…

> 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.

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

#263

Post by farp » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 7:09 PM UTC

busymom0 wrote: post #258

farp wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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…

> 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 cliché even Fox News already moved on to new talking points.

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

#264

Post by harpiaharpyja » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

j_m_b wrote: post #246

kstrauser wrote: post #210

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 artic…

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!

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.

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

#265

Post by xqyf » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #252

kstrauser wrote: post #210

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 artic…

FUCK SNOPES --- They are literally FAKE NEWS and they are actively paid to push narratives. Utter douchebags.

Surely there's a horrible subreddit for you to secrete hot takes like "literally FAKE NEWS" on instead of this forum?

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

#266

Post by Uhhrrr » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #210

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 artic…

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.

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

#267

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #234

hannasanarion wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

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

#268

Post by busymom0 » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

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-...

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.

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

#269

Post by sdljfjafsd » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #144

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?

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.

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

#270

Post by WalterBright » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 7:28 PM UTC

Uhhrrr wrote: post #266

kstrauser wrote: post #210

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 artic…

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.

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.