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Snopes.com

Type of site	Reference pages
Owner	Chris Richmond Drew Schoentrup
Created by	Barbara Mikkelson David P. Mikkelson
URL	snopes.com
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Required only on forums
Launched	1994; 30 years ago (1994) (as Urban Legends Reference Pages)
Current status	Active

Snopes /ˈsnoʊps/, formerly known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a fact-checking website. It has been described as a "well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors" on the Internet. The site has also been seen as a source for both validating and debunking urban legends and similar stories in American popular culture.

History

1990s

In 1994, David and Barbara Mikkelson created an urban folklore web site that would become Snopes.com. Snopes was an early online encyclopedia focused on urban legends, which mainly presented search results of user discussions. The site grew to encompass a wide range of subjects and became a resource to which Internet users began submitting pictures and stories of questionable veracity. According to the Mikkelsons, Snopes predated the search engine concept of fact-checking via search results. David Mikkelson had originally adopted the username "Snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner) in the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban.

2000s

In 2002, the site had become known well enough that a television pilot called Snopes: Urban Legends was completed with American actor Jim Davidson as host. However, it did not air on major networks.

By 2010, the site was attracting seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month.

2010s

By mid-2014, Barbara had not written for Snopes "in several years" and David was forced to hire users from Snopes.com's message board to assist him in running the site. The Mikkelsons divorced around that time. Christopher Richmond and Drew Schoentrup became part owners in July 2016 with the purchase of Barbara Mikkelson's share by the internet media management company Proper Media.

On March 9, 2017, David Mikkelson terminated the brokering agreement with Proper Media, which is also the company that provides Snopes with web development, hosting, and advertising support. The move prompted Proper Media to stop remitting advertising revenue and to file a lawsuit in May. In late June, Bardav—the company founded by David and Barbara Mikkelson in 2003 to own and operate snopes.com—started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to continue operations. They raised $500,000 in 24 hours. Later, in August, a judge ordered Proper Media to disburse advertising revenues to Bardav while the case was pending.

In July 2018, Snopes abruptly terminated its contract with Managing Editor Brooke Binkowski, with no explanation. By the time Snopes co-founder and CEO David Mikkelson confirmed the termination to her, the situation was still not clear.

In early 2019, Snopes announced that it had acquired the website OnTheIssues.org, and is "hard at work modernizing its extensive archives". OnTheIssues is a website that seeks to "present all the relevant evidence, assess how strongly each piece supports or opposes a position, and summarize it with an average" in order to "provide voters with reliable information on candidates’ policy positions".

In 2018 and 2019, Snopes fact-checked several articles from The Babylon Bee, a satirical website, rating them "False". The decision resulted in Facebook adding warnings to links to those articles shared on its site. Snopes added a new rating called "Labeled Satire" to identify satirical stories.

In 2019, Snopes was embroiled in legal disputes with Proper Media, with a court case scheduled for spring 2020. By then Proper Media had become a co-owner of Bardav through acquiring Barbara Mikkelson's half-interest share, intending to take overall ownership of Snopes for its own "portfolio of media sites". The move failed as David Mikkelson had no intention to sell his share.

2020s

COVID-19 pandemic and misinformation

As the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, many people tried to "educate themselves on the coronavirus" and find "any comfort, certainty, or hope for a cure ". Snopes has around 237 COVID-related fact-checking articles.

Plagiarism by co-founder David Mikkelson

On August 13, 2021, BuzzFeed News published an investigation by reporter Dean Sterling Jones that showed David Mikkelson had used plagiarized material from different news sources in 54 articles between 2015 and 2019 in an effort to increase website traffic. Mikkelson also published plagiarized material under a pseudonym, "Jeff Zarronandia". The BuzzFeed inquiry prompted Snopes to launch an internal review of Mikkelson's articles and retracted 60 of them the day the Buzzfeed story appeared. Mikkelson admitted to committing "multiple serious copyright violations" and apologized for "serious lapses in judgment." He was suspended from editorial duties during the investigation, but remains an officer and stakeholder in the company.

Change of ownership

On September 16, 2022, David Mikkelson stepped down as CEO and was succeeded by shareholder and board member Chris Richmond. Chris Richmond and fellow shareholder Drew Schoentrup together acquired 100% of the company, ending the ownership dispute which began in 2017.

Main site

Snopes aims to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends. The site has been referenced by news media and other sites, including CNN, MSNBC, Fortune, Forbes, and The New York Times. By March 2009, the site had more than six million visitors per month. David Mikkelson ran the website from his home in Tacoma, Washington.

Mikkelson has stressed the reference portion of the name Urban Legends Reference Pages, indicating that the intention is not merely to dismiss or confirm misconceptions and rumors but to provide evidence for such debunkings and confirmation as well. Where appropriate, pages are generally marked "undetermined" or "unverifiable" when there is not enough evidence to either support or disprove a given claim.

In an attempt to demonstrate the perils of over-reliance on the Internet as authority, Snopes assembled a series of fabricated urban folklore tales that it termed "The Repository of Lost Legends". The name was chosen for its acronym, T.R.O.L.L., a reference to the definition of the word troll, meaning an internet persona intended to be deliberately provocative or incendiary.

In 2009, FactCheck.org reviewed a sample of Snopes's responses to political rumors regarding George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama, and found them to be free from bias in all cases. In 2012, The Florida Times-Union reported that About.com's urban legends researcher found a "consistent effort to provide even-handed analyses" and that Snopes' cited sources and numerous reputable analyses of its content confirm its accuracy.

Mikkelson has said that the site receives more complaints of liberal bias than conservative bias, but added that the same debunking standards are applied to all political urban legends.

Controversies

The Babylon Bee and Mistaken Satire

In March 2018, The Babylon Bee published a Satirical article quipping that CNN was using an industrial-sized washing machine to "spin" the news. Snopes fact-checked the article, rating it "False". Facebook then cited this fact-check in a warning message to The Babylon Bee, threatening to limit their content distribution and monetization. Ford tweeted a screenshot of the warning message to his followers, drawing public attention to the matter. Facebook quickly apologized, with the statement that "there's a difference between false news and satire. This was a mistake and should not have been rated false in our system. It's since been corrected and won't count against the domain in any way". Snopes later issued a fact-check of its previous fact-check, saying that "it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof."

In July 2019, The Babylon Bee published an article referring to a real-world incident, titled "Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her to Go Back to Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said 'My Pleasure'", which Snopes rated "false". They also this time suggested that the article was deliberately deceptive, rather than genuinely satirical. Ford responded on Twitter, highlighting what he deemed to be problematic wording in the fact-check. The Babylon Bee also released a statement, calling the fact-check a "smear" that was "both dishonest and disconcerting". The statement concluded by saying a law firm had been retained to represent The Babylon Bee because "Snopes appears to be actively engaged in an effort to discredit and deplatform us". After receiving some backlash and a formal demand letter from The Babylon Bee's attorney, Snopes made revisions to the wording of the fact check and added an explanatory editor's note.

The Babylon Bee's chief executive, Seth Dillon, appeared on Fox News in August 2019 to discuss the incident. He said The Babylon Bee must take the matter seriously "because social networks, which we depend on for our traffic, have relied upon fact-checking sources in the past to determine what's fake news and what isn't. In cases where is calling us fake news and lumping us in with them rather than saying this is satire, that could actually damage us. It could put our business in jeopardy".

Snopes' co-founder David Mikkelson acknowledged to The New York Times that their fact-check was poorly written, but denied trying to discredit The Babylon Bee. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Mikkelson stated, "The question you should be asking is not: 'why is Snopes addressing material from a particular site so often?' But, 'what is it about that site that makes its content trigger the fact-check threshold?'"

In August 2019, Snopes announced a new rating for satire sites called "labeled satire". Articles from The Babylon Bee that were previously rated "false" were updated with the new rating. Snopes explains the label: "This rating indicates that a claim is derived from content described by its creator and/or the wider audience as satire. Not all content described by its creator or audience as 'satire' necessarily constitutes satire, and this rating does not make a distinction between 'real' satire and content that may not be effectively recognized or understood as satire despite being labeled as such". Mann objected to this label in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal, writing that the label "is meant to suggest that we are somehow making jokes in bad faith".

On Aug 16, 2019, Snopes Published an Article Titled "Study: Too Many People Think Satirical News Is Real" this was seen by some people as damage control and a way to justify their behavior toward the Babylon Bee. The Article has been criticized as a further misrepresentation of the Babylon Bee. The Survey presented in the article was conducted poorly.

Plagiarism by co-founder David Mikkelson

On August 13, 2021, BuzzFeed News published an investigation by reporter Dean Sterling Jones that showed David Mikkelson had used plagiarized material from different news sources in 54 articles between 2015 and 2019 in an effort to increase website traffic. Mikkelson also published plagiarized material under a pseudonym, "Jeff Zarronandia". The BuzzFeed inquiry prompted Snopes to launch an internal review of Mikkelson's articles and retracted 60 of them the day the Buzzfeed story appeared. Mikkelson admitted to committing "multiple serious copyright violations" and apologized for "serious lapses in judgment." He was suspended from editorial duties during the investigation, but remains an officer and stakeholder in the company.

Funding

In 2016, Snopes said that the entirety of its revenue was derived from advertising. In the same year it received an award of $75,000 from the James Randi Educational Foundation, an organization formed to debunk paranormal claims. In 2017, it raised approximately $700,000 from a crowd-sourced GoFundMe effort and received $100,000 from Facebook as a part of a fact-checking partnership. Snopes also offers a premium membership that disables ads .

On February 1, 2019, Snopes announced that it had ended its fact-checking partnership with Facebook. Snopes did not rule out the possibility of working with Facebook in the future but said it needed to "determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication and staff". Snopes added that the loss of revenue from the partnership meant the company would "have less money to invest in our publication—and we will need to adapt to make up for it".

Snopes publishes a yearly summary detailing expenses and sources of income.

See also

• Hoaxes – fabricated falsehoods
• FactCheck.org – Fact-checking website
• List of common misconceptions

References

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2. "Disclosures". Snopes.com. Retrieved November 20, 2022.
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6. Same article: "Corporations Combat Insistent Urban Legends on Internet". The Courier. March 4, 2007. (image 7).
7. Henry, Neil (2007). American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media. University of California Press. p. 285. ISBN 978-0520243422. The most widely known resource for validating or debunking rumors, myths, hoaxes, and urban legends in popular American culture is the website run by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson at www.snopes.com... .
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56. "Let's Make Fact-Checking Even Better". Snopes. August 16, 2019. Retrieved August 17, 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
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62. Jones, Dean Sterling (August 13, 2021). "The Cofounder Of The Fact-Checking Site Snopes Was Writing Plagiarized Articles Under A Fake Name". BuzzFeed.
63. Streitfeld, David (December 25, 2016). "For Fact Checking Website Snopes, a Bigger Role Brings More Attacks". The New York Times. Retrieved December 27, 2016.
64. ^ "Disclosures". Snopes.com. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
65. Izadi, Elahe (April 15, 2020). "There are so many coronavirus myths that even Snopes can't keep up". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 3, 2020.
66. Green, Vinny; Mikkelson, David (February 1, 2019). "A Message to Our Community Regarding the Facebook Fact-Checking Partnership". Snopes.com. Retrieved February 2, 2019.
67. "Snopes says nope to Facebook's money and leaves fact-checking program". The Verge. February 1, 2019. Retrieved February 22, 2021.

External links

• Official website

• Internet properties established in 1995
• Webby Award winners
• Skepticism
• 1995 establishments in California
• Fact-checking websites