I don't trust Snopes. I can't quite put my finger on it, maybe it's working with Facebook, maybe it's the whole fake news fiasco, but something just doesn't feel right.
They run through a litany of NGO complaints, basically presenting one side of the debate. However, as early as January of 2016, I had addressed many of those complaints elsewhere [1]. By April of 2016, a respected anti-wildlife trafficking NGO even declared that "it would be rash to rule out the possibility that trade in synthetic rhinoceros horn could play a role in future conservation strategies [2]." Things have only improved from there [3]. Yet, "what's controversial" turns into "what's false" on Snopes. After seeing how the sausage is made, there is no way I'll ever trust them.
Disclaimer: This commenter is a CEO of a firm that is in conflict with Snopes. See:
https://twitter.com/Pembient
In the future, I would recommend disclaiming potential bias through your profile or on the comment itself. Otherwise, commenters who skimm may be misled and commenters who read may question your authenticity.
The Snopes report seems pretty good to me. It may not be favorable to your company's product or plan, but it cites legitimate concerns and douses some inaccurate speculation by some Facebook page looking for likes.
The whole article is an argument from authority with no countervailing facts. To be fair, though, it is much better than the original article, which isn't in the Wayback Machine for some reason. You would think they would keep an archive of changes somewhere! Anyway, I suppose one can hope that the third iteration will be even better.
