
Snopes pulls out of its fact-checking partnership with Facebook - pulisse
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2019/snopes-pulls-out-of-its-fact-checking-partnership-with-facebook/
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nitwit005
If Facebook was only willing to devote $100,000 to it, it seems like they
basically spent the minimum amount possible so that they could claim they were
doing something. The expense doesn't remotely match up to the scale of the
problem.

~~~
rhizome
...or the value of the work.

~~~
incongruity
That’s not really a new MO for them - remember, this is a site that uses
unpaid content creators to attract other unpaid content creators and then
sells access to us and knowledge about us to businesses and political
interests among others.

Figuring out how to pay very little and suck out a lot of value is what their
business is built on.

~~~
rhizome
The mere definition of profit does not excuse Snopes' having got a bad deal.

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athenot
Oddly, it seems that Facebook needs Snopes more than Snopes needed Facebook.

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zaksoup
it is wild to me how many people are in this thread saying "Snopes is
partisan" or "Snopes is biased" or "Snopes is not a real fact checker" and who
are also entirely unable to provide any actual evidence.

A link to an article on the Federalist (laughably partisan) is not "evidence"
any more than pointing out that they have fact-checked satirical sites is.
[https://reddit.com/r/atetheonion](https://reddit.com/r/atetheonion) is a
thing for a reason, and in every post about Satire Snopes goes out of their
way to highlight that they are responding to Satire.

Your own biases are showing and it's kind of a bad look.

~~~
fdavison
This site on ethics routinely deconstructs the problems at Snopes:
[https://ethicsalarms.com/?s=snopes](https://ethicsalarms.com/?s=snopes)

~~~
hannasanarion
How surprising, a site with a banner that says "it's okay to be white" and
currently has a front-page article about how black people are too stupid to
talk in court makes a bunch of nitpicks of snopes' prose.

Presumably so that they can later say "snopes is always wrong and biased" when
Snopes contradicts Breitbart's claims that Obama and the UN and Black Lives
Matter are planning to burn down Central Park next weekend.

(actual thing a relative told me, actual breitbart story from summer 2015,for
those HN users fortunate enough not to be exposed to the worst of the fake
news epidemic)

~~~
sublupo
Here is an example of a false Snopes article [https://www.snopes.com/fact-
check/gop-obamacare-repeal-elect...](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gop-
obamacare-repeal-election/)

Snopes claims that a meme (showing a picture of people, many of whom have red
x over their faces, writing that everyone with a red x has been voted out of
office) is true even though they admit

> Although memes are frequently grossly inaccurate, this one got the general
> idea and numbers correct (even if the persons actually pictured in the
> accompanying photograph are difficult or impossible to identify).

Some of the people with an x were not elected people and some did not get
voted out. This meme is clearly false, yet Snopes calls it true.

~~~
hannasanarion
Is the information on the snopes page false or incorrect? No, it isn't.

There's a reason that they write more about each topic than merely the
headline.

"snopes occasionally makes editorial decisions I disagree with" is not the
same as "snopes is fake and unreliable".

Sorry, I must have missed it the first time, tell me again why you continue to
rely on an overtly racist blog to be your arbiter of "ethics"?

~~~
sublupo
> Is the information on the snopes page false or incorrect? No, it isn't.

It is both false and incorrect. Saying that "every one with an x has since
been voted out of congress" When not every one with an x has since been voted
out of congress is false. I mean even the article quotes a tweet listing 10
people who were incorrectly marked. You should see what Snopes does every time
a right wing person says something not 100% correct.

> "snopes occasionally makes editorial decisions I disagree with" is not the
> same as "snopes is fake and unreliable".

Again, the Snopes article is blatantly false.

> Sorry, I must have missed it the first time, tell me again why you continue
> to rely on an overtly racist blog to be your arbiter of "ethics"?

Sorry, I missed why you think that I continue to rely on a racist blog to be
my arbiter of ethics.

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ransford
Was the $100K mentioned in this article the total amount Facebook gave Snopes?
Because that's, like, one new-grad signing bonus.

~~~
quadrangle
For a particularly high-demand technical engineering position maybe. For other
things… well, Facebook pays folks in the Philippines something like $2/hour to
get PTSD while screening posts for the worst content the worst humans are able
to generate (beheadings for example). Where would you expect fact-checking to
fit in?

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abtinf
RealClearPolitics has an interesting guide to the different fact-check
providers. In particular, it calls out the difference between fact-checks and
opinion-checks.

[https://www.realclearpolitics.com/fact_check_review/](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/fact_check_review/)

------
Fauntleroy
I can't believe the massive number of HN users here who are willingly throwing
critical thinking under the bus just because of political bias. It's maddening
that people are making the jump from "Snopes posted something possibly
incorrect about soda cans" and "Snopes one time fact checked shitty satire"
directly to "Snopes is untrustworthy".

Everything is imperfect, even fact checking groups. If you're going to throw
them under the bus for these tiny errors, I sure hope you've already
incinerated every computing device you own, because boy do you have some
things to learn about them.

~~~
ijb03qv7
The problem with a website like Snopes is that, if you want to claim to be an
unbiased gatekeeper of the truth, you better be perfect.

Since humans are imperfect, a site like Snopes can not exist.

~~~
fitpolar
I don't know why this would get downvoted. Seems reasonable, whether it's
Snopes or anyone.

Similar to Apple claiming "it just works", you better make sure it works. Or
Google proclaiming "don't be evil". Etc.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
> Similar to Apple claiming "it just works", you better make sure it works.

My Mac got a kernel panic yesterday. My response was not to swear off Apple
products forever.

~~~
fitpolar
> My Mac got a kernel panic yesterday. My response is not to swear off Apple
> products forever.

Yet your response is to downvote everything you disagree with?

Not swearing off Apple products forever is your personal choice. Personally I
agree with that. But I know plenty of people who DO choose to swear off Apple
products when something doesn't work. That's also their choice, and I don't
have a problem with that.

~~~
eridius
Did those people flee civilization to go live naked in a cave somewhere?

No? Then no, their reaction to something not working is not to immediately
swear off that entire product category forever. Because, sooner or later,
_everything_ fails to work correctly in some fashion.

------
0x262d
fact checking has always been a silly, hopeless attempt to find a technocratic
solution to fundamentally political problems.

~~~
fitpolar
It's a hopeless quest until AI reaches a certain level of objective
interpretation.

Regarding humans, most people who are capable of researching truth without any
bias, don't have a voice. Human history is riddled with partisan extremists
presenting biased information as neutral and factual. Snopes is no exception.

~~~
deogeo
Do you trust whoever trained or is controlling the AI?

~~~
fitpolar
At this point nothing is trustworthy. But I have more faith that AI is going
to do a better job in future than humans ever have. We may be 100 years away
from that though, or 1000 years. Who knows?

~~~
52-6F-62
And then this AI is the sole bearer of all ultimate, unarguable truth
regardless. Like a god you mean?

~~~
fitpolar
Is that your interpretation? Mine is the opposite: "At this point nothing is
trustworthy".

Just saying that humans have an extremely poor track record at compromising
information for political gain. Anything would be better at this point, you
can't get any worse.

~~~
52-6F-62
I think it could get worse but that’s just me.

I prefer an aggregate. Then I can derive what I think is the truth.

Trust is learned, anyway. Except for children— they often do as a default
until a point in their lives.

