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by RickJWagner·7y ago·view on hn ↗
No loss for Facebook.

I've had vigorous discussions about Snopes with friends. I'm mostly conservative, I feel Snopes has a liberal bias. My liberal friends feel otherwise.

After much back-and-forth, what we found is this: - Snopes seems to be careful about printing only true things - But Snopes controls the narrative and decides which issues to fact-check. They seem to publish a lot more material that validates left-leaning opinions than right-leaning ones

At the time of last checking, Snopes had a single political fact-checker, she was a staunch Democrat.

6 comments
If Snopes is doing more conservative fact-checks than liberal fact-checks, it's probably because the modern Republican party seems to have made "lying" into one of its core principles (this is most certainly true for the President, and is at the very least a common pastime for other Republican bigwigs).

> At the time of last checking, Snopes had a single political fact-checker, she was a staunch Democrat.

What's your source on this? Snopes's own documentation for their team doesn't indicate that any particular person is "the single political fact-checker", and Snopes itself is run by 2 passionately apolitical people.

I just did a random sampling of several of the "latest fact checks" that appear to relate to politics (e.g. about Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, or Trump) and in the first 5 facts I checked, I found 4 different writers. So as far as I can tell, it's not remotely true that they have "a single political fact-checker".

The OP was describing Snopes Pre-Trump era and much of the 2016 election cycle, I think he was ball park right.
Have a look at this article from Forbes. The assertions (if true) are pretty harsh against Snopes.

Please give it a fair read, offer your perspective.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...

That's not an article from Forbes. It's a blog post hosted on the Forbes website. Any Forbes.com/sites/{something} page isn't Forbes content, it's independent content unaffiliated with the Forbes editorial team
Fair enough, thanks for the correction.

Still, if the assertions are true, it raises concerns.

I'm not sold on Snopes, either. I don't know whether they have a bias, but I'm not convinced they're terribly accurate. For instance, they have a debunking of the myth that Marilyn Monroe use to have six toes. Part of their evidence was that if she did, and it were removed, then it would affect her balance and she would have to re-learn to walk normally, let alone gracefully.

My wife is a podiatrist. A significant part of her job is lopping off toes. I asked her if that was true, and she said that it absolutely was not. Her post-amputation patients are routinely perfectly fine and have no trouble walking. Even losing your big toe isn't a huge deal. Try it yourself: point it upward so that it doesn't touch the ground and walk around some. It's not hard at all.

I wrote them to share the information. I agreed that the myth was false, but that the bit about her being unable to walk afterward wasn't good supporting evidence. They replied with a snide comment basically accusing me of believing that Marilyn had six toes (which I absolutely don't believe, or more precisely, I could not care less about). Since then I've read a lot of their debunking skeptically. I mean, I think they mean well and I'm sure they're mostly accurate. However, I have first hand experience with them being unwilling to vet their own evidence. If they can play fast and loose with a goofy story about an extra toe, are they being rigorous elsewhere? I don't know.

It’s like the BBC in the UK - half the population think it’s left biased and the other half think it’s right biased.
I'm Indian, I think the BBC has an anti-India bias, and is heavily politically conservative, but socially liberal. The one thing I do give the BBC credit for, is that they did not resort to overt mud-slinging against Jeremy Corbyn, as opposed to the Guardian.
Some British organizations still seem to believe the empire is alive and well.
I'll add most Western media to that list of publications with anti India bias, such as NYTimes and Washington Post to name a few.
And The Economist
I do admit I see the BBC as left-leaning.

I just finished reading a BBC article on Jussie Smollett, the actor in the news this week. The BBC article gave no hint the issue under discussion is anything less than accepted fact as Smollett presents it. A review of police findings (especially video reviews) suggests there is much to be investigated.

I can't see how the BBC justifies this.

I don't think anyone views Snopes as right leaning. If they do, they might want to look around the site.
> They seem to publish a lot more material that validates left-leaning opinions than right-leaning ones

Do you still see an imbalance if you take out one or both of the following:

1. Fact checking of President Trump, and

2. Fact checking of politicians' claims on matters of science?

President Trump makes a lot more statements than any other politician, especially on Twitter, making a lot of very specific and objectively reviewable claims that often have no support even from conservative sources. He is the President, and so a fact checking site can't really ignore him.

He's basically a huge outlier, and this alone is probably going to push any fair and balanced fact checking site into appearing left leaning.

For example, he Tweeted "We are not even into February and the cost of illegal immigration so far this year is $18,959,495,168. Cost Friday was $603,331,392. There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country. So ridiculous! DHS". Nobody can figure out where he got those numbers, his staff says they don't know, and they are about twice as high as even conservative anti-immigrant groups claim. And he does this kind of Tweet a lot.

As far as science goes, both liberal and conservative politicians do have problems with putting ideology ahead of facts, but not with the same sciences.

For example, I think liberals are more likely than conservatives to think there is a connection between autism and vaccines, and so take a political position on vaccination that is at odds with science. Conservatives are more likely to think climate change is not happening, or if it is that human activity does not affect it, and so take a political position on that at odds with science.

But vaccination is simply not something that comes up as often as climate in the news, meaning that there is simply less opportunity for politicians to says something stupid about vaccines than there is for them to say something stupid about climate.

Vaccination rates are usually only going to become prominent enough to prompt politicians to make stupid statements when we have something like a measles outbreak which is still fairly rare. With climate, all it takes is some cold weather to get a few politicians to stupidly say that this proves that the climate is not warming, and this happens several times a year.

(Also, the vaccination situation is muddled by the people who are against vaccination requirements for religion reasons or personal liberty reasons rather than misunderstanding autism, and these people tend to be more on the right than the left).

> But Snopes controls the narrative and decides which issues to fact-check.

There's definitely truth to that and worth some concern.

> They seem to publish a lot more material that validates left-leaning opinions than right-leaning ones

Probably because while media on both sides has their bias and will twist the facts a bit to fit their narrative, right-wing media just invents complete lies and falsehoods.

Nobody on the left has even come close to something as dumb as Pizzagate.

I think what you said about choosing what to fact check is true, however, it is also true that spreading propaganda/intentional false information is a massive problem on the right, and a much smaller problem on the left. It exists and is an issue, but there is a massive industry on the right that willfully spreads false information and it encompasses almost every conservative media outlet. All of the big political commentators on the right do it constantly all the way up to the president who tells nonstop lies.
the left is just better at producing propaganda. do not forget most of our universities have become extreme left and the papers they write reflect this. It is not an accident the way money has corrupted research.
If I crank the steering wheel of my car hard right the center line of the freeway doesn't actually move. It might appear that way from my little bubble but reality stays the same. From the perspective of a typical Fox News viewer education has a strong left bias because they're effectively driving on the shoulder.
> do not forget most of our universities have become extreme left

I'd posit that people on the left typically value education more than people on the right and are therefore more likely to attend universities.

> and the papers they write reflect this. It is not an accident the way money has corrupted research.

I read this as "research is coming up with conclusions that don't fit my world view/opinions/beliefs and I don't like it."

The HN equivalent of the deplorables comment.
Meaning it was rude and unprofessional, yet undeniably true?
Yes the right wing does have worse-off sourcing in general in comparison to the left wing. But the left wing is what has been holding power, a la the article here, with the partisan Snopes given control over the content of people's feeds. My main criticism of Snopes is their choices of what perspective of the 'facts' that they will check. The worst example of this is seen here (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ronald-reagan-alzheimers-d...) in that according to the article itself, it would have been incredibly unlikely for Reagan to have had diagnosable Alzheimer's during his presidency, and yet the rating is not a "No" or a "No" with some qualifications, but an "Unproven".
From the evidence presented there I would say it is unclear.

Also no one can fact check everything just like no one can report everything. So I agree there are subtle ways of being biased that don’t require telling lies.

That will always be a limitation. That said the right tells so many more lies that any fact checking service should be spending more time on the right vs the left.

Sorry, I should have given the quote that I was referring to:

"It must also be said that given that the average life expectancy of a patient diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease is eight to 10 years, Reagan, who died in 2004 (10 years after his diagnosis), would have been extraordinarily long-lived for an Alzheimer’s patient if he was already suffering from the disease, as some claim, in 1984."

I was certainly being hyperbolic above in saying this article was the worst offender though. Here is also another mild case: (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-senate-ban-he-s...), where the headline is geared toward the strongest claim and yet there is in fact a nonstandard situation in that there is a push within the committee to designate 'they' as the standard pronoun, and documents were altered. But seeing as the right winged media made the claims of banning themselves, Snopes is boxed in here.