Snopes pulls out of its fact-checking partnership with Facebook

The article is: "Is the EPA Allowing for the Approval of New Asbestos-Containing Products?" The original basis for their "Mostly True" conclusion http://archive.is/w834Y is this:

"The first, more generally, is that the EPA could have used the currently unfolding overhaul of the TSCA — which began at the end of the Obama administration and has continued along a very different path under Trump — to ban any new uses of asbestos, something that had been the case at the end of the last administration. Instead, they are explicitly allowing new uses, but with the caveat that the EPA first evaluate possible potential new uses based on “risk evaluation, select studies, and use the best available science.”

They link to this previous ban on "the use of asbestos in products that have not historically contained asbestos": https://archive.is/3F4CC which has been in place since 1989. In reality, the proposed EPA rule specifically says that this ban remains in place. The SNUR approval process replaces the free-for-all on unbanned asbestos products, not the existing ban. (The "at the end of the last administration" bit is also gratuitous politicization, the ban's three decades old.)

Now here's how they describe the original version of their fact check in the blog post at https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/09/01/epa-suggested-change-... which tries to make the EPA look like the dishonest ones: "On 11 June 2018, Snopes.com published a fact check titled “Is the EPA Allowing for the Approval of New Asbestos-Containing Products?” In that article, we rated the claim that “the Environmental Protection Agency will allow new asbestos products to enter the market” as “mostly true,” based on the fact that the EPA had proposed a new rule for asbestos that would (at first) block some currently unregulated but inactive uses of asbestos while (later) providing a framework for those unregulated uses’ formal approval should they pass a safety review."

This is a broadly accurate description of the proposed rule, but as we've seen it's not what the original article said. They then go on to make it look like the EPA is playing dirty tricks with the definition of "new uses" by "defining this term in a legal sense, based on a 1991 court ruling, as “asbestos products that were not being manufactured, processed or imported” as of 12 July 1989". In reality, the EPA were pointing out Snopes' own dishonest conflation of the narrow legal sense in which "new uses" were banned previously with the kinds of usage covered by the Significant New Use Rule. Next, they justify keeping the original conclusion based on this argument:

"Both of these objections, which we have addressed in an update to our original post, present an incomplete view of the controversy. Instead, they mask the fact that the proposed legislation allows a pathway for certain old (and inactive) uses of asbestos to return to the market with the EPA’s blessing. The EPA, via the publication of two documents, laid out a process that allows for uses of asbestos that have been effectively dead (thanks to litigation and health risks that their use carries), to be granted official approval using a safety review that does not allow scientists to consider a considerable bulk of information demonstrating asbestos’ cancer risk."

This is really tendentious. The new rule is (intentionally) terrible for anyone who wants to manufacture or import asbestos products covered by it. They have to contact the EPA 90 days in advance and essentially prove that their proposed use is safe. If the EPA drags their feet on responding or decides there's not enough evidence, they can't go ahead. The EPA have indicated that it's unlikely anything would meet this standard. Even if a company got past this they'd still get sued by private litigants. Finally, the part about excluding information from safety assessments is based on this which looks totally wrong:

"The second problem, more specifically, concerns the way in which the EPA has proposed to evaluate that risk. In May 2018, the EPA published a document known as the “Problem Formulation of the Risk Evaluation for Asbestos,” which establishes the scientific approach the EPA will take in evaluating these new uses. Significantly, their approach will not include information from existing, or “legacy” uses of asbestos, despite the significant body of work around health risks stemming from those uses"

The EPA document in question https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2018-06/documents... just says that they're only assessing the risks of asbestos uses that are currently ongoing. It says absolutely nothing about excluding evidence from historic uses of asbestos in general; they just won't publish any conclusions about their safety. It also means that this is totally irrelevant to the SNUR which is entirely about those historical uses. (Which makes trying to continue those uses an even dicier proposition. The SNUR means companies have to wait for the EPA to complete their risk assessment and hope it somehow turns out positive.)

Snopes claims that a meme (showing a picture of people, many of whom have red x over their faces, writing that everyone with a red x has been voted out of office) is true even though they admit

> Although memes are frequently grossly inaccurate, this one got the general idea and numbers correct (even if the persons actually pictured in the accompanying photograph are difficult or impossible to identify).

Some of the people with an x were not elected people and some did not get voted out. This meme is clearly false, yet Snopes calls it true.

My Mac got a kernel panic yesterday. My response was not to swear off Apple products forever.