The New York Times:
The last line of defense against the torrent of half-truths, untruths and outright fakery that make up so much of the modern internet is in a downscale strip mall near the beach.
Snopes, the fact-checking website, does not have an office designed to impress, or even be noticed. A big sign outside still bears the name of the previous tenant, a maker of underwater headphones. Inside there’s nothing much — a bunch of improvised desks, a table tennis table, cartons of Popchips and cases of Dr Pepper. It looks like a dot-com on the way to nowhere.
Appearances deceive. This is where the muddled masses come by the virtual millions to establish just what the heck is really going on in a world turned upside down.
Snopes is my go to site for debunking general fake news.
If gullible people are weeds, Snopes has a tough row to hoe. The bigger issue is people tend to succumb to confirmation bias, so the veracity of a story becomes subjective for them.
I look forward to Snopes toeing the party line and selectively fact checking when it suits them.
I look forward to hearing from more people who’d criticize Snopes without doing any fact-checking themselves.
Are you saying they are soleless, laced up boot lickers?
What “party line”? Is there an evidence they are doing “fact checking when it suits them”?
If you can get people to reject the knowledge and understanding we’ve built as a culture though decades and in some cases centuries, then you have found a mechanism to fill peoples’ minds with absolutely anything at all.
I see this happening every day recently and it is extremely disturbing.
Nope
No, this is also something I often hear from Fox news devotes.
i reject things i disagree with! rah rah!
so you’re saying the world is going to hell? i think I’ve heard that before — from old people. dont believe it. information is everywhere.
There’s a lot of noise out there, too, drowning out the genuine information. And our population is now full of people who were never taught critical thinking, after decades of public schools having been subjugated to relentless corporate assessment tests and states where mythology is taught as history and science.
We’re in a bit of trouble.
Upvoted plus you made me laugh! : )
I don’t know, I can find a myriad of online articles that contradict you! /s
[eyes bleeding]
From comments I see online, too many people don’t understand the difference between opinion pieces and fake news.
I could write an op-ed in which I say “Trump’s presidency will be a disaster for this country.” This is my opinion. The future will determine how accurate it is. I could also try to provide evidence, in terms of statistical analyses etc., to support my conclusion. Those analyses might be cherry-picked, but they must be accurate and true. Even so, the conclusion is still an opinion. You may disagree with it. You may be able to offer a rebuttal. That’s fine.
Op-eds, as I just described them, have been an honorable and legitimate tradition for centuries.
This is entirely separate from fake news — in which the author deliberately (or maybe sometimes unintentionally) writes something that is entirely false — and presents it as fact — with an aim to either make money (such as via clicked links) or gain some political advantage (by deceiving people into thinking the article is true).
Fake news has been around for a long time as well. But it is not honorable or legitimate. Plus, it is only with the advent of online social media, that fake news has been able to attract such a broad audience and have such far reaching effects. As it becomes more and more difficult to figure out what is fake and what is not — and as people increasingly confine themselves to their own confirmatory bubble — fake news threatens the very foundation of our democracy: an informed population.
By trying to help with this dilemma, Snopes performs an invaluable service. Those who criticize it because they don’t like some of the things that Snopes reports are the very same people who believe and spread the fake news that Snopes is trying to combat.
It really shouldn’t be. In broad strokes Snopes can be good for quickly getting to the bottom of the latest chain letters circulating social media, but they wander pretty quickly off the reservation when it gets into political nuance. Snopes has an agenda, and it’s not an unbiased one. It never has been.
I agree wholeheartedly with your premise and conclusion, but there is no imperative in place upon anyone writing an opinion piece (whether dignified by an age-old masthead or not) that requires their evidence is objectively “accurate and true.”
Too many otherwise-honorable media outlets—whether or not they identify as news sources—in this country have based very reasonable-sounding opinion pieces upon insular, circularly-justified dogma for decades, if not centuries. The tradition you describe has always been subject to illegitimate intentions.
and the Clinton News Network.
There are “honorable” media outlets left in the USA or World?
A few. Make the effort to find them.
The Clinton News Network covered Trump more than Clinton this past election cycle. Maybe we can just change the diss to Corporate News Network and get away from the ultra-partisan bullshit.
No one’s reliable these days, huh?
Good thing for websites like Snopes!
Are you really that naive to trust Snopes? http://foodbabe.com/2017/02/24/do-you-trust-snopes-you-wont-after-reading-how-they-work-with-monsanto-operatives/