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

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

#271
post #251

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…

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 wit…

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_Crichton#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.

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

#272
post #18
post #11

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.

Can you provide an example of an article that you feel has a clear political slant?

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.

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

#273
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.

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

#274

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…

Who replied at snopes and who did you speak to?

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

#275
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#276
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

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.

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

#277
post #158

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 dangerou…

Can you provide a link to an article you feel is especially illustrative of this problem?

I gave couple examples here. It's a long comment so I don't want to repost:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173312

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

#278
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So they can silently change stuff without the ability for someone to go back and look at what it used to say.

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.

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

#279

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…

Who replied at snopes and who did you speak to?

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.

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

#280
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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