Many of
us have used the Snopes web site from time to time in order to
check out the veracity of stories or to check out emails to see
if they are real.
Snopes was founded by a husband and wife
team who are now in the middle of a contentious divorce in
which founder David Mikkelsen has been accused of embezzling
$98,000 of company money to spend on “himself and
prostitutes”.
The site is now 50%
owned by an ad agency (Proper Media) and they make money by
generating millions of views on the 3rd-party advertisements on
the website. It makes sense for them to seek out articles that
are viral to “debunk”, so that they can piggy-back on that
traffic and generate more advertising revenue.
It has a hired team of suspect fact checkers who collaborate to
debunk falsehoods that are trending on the internet. These fact
checkers reportedly have no editorial oversight and do not
follow standard journalistic procedures such as interviewing the
authors of articles they are trying to debunk to get all sides
of the story.
Snopes is one of the sites that Facebook recently partnered with
to fact check news stories on its platform. In the
counter-intelligence world, this is what is known as a
“wilderness of mirrors” – creating a chaotic information
environment that so perfectly blends truth, half-truth, and
fiction that even the best can no longer tell what is real and
what is not.