2. They said that a satire story was not true, which, of course it isn't. They said it was satire, which it is.
3. Facebook automatically took action against the fact-checked site, the very agreement that Snopes is now pulling out of.
Which of those bullet points means that Snopes is bad?
The part labelling the following sentence a "claim":
"CNN invested in an industrial-sized washing machine to help their journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication."
The part where they instructed FB to stop allowing people to see this satire piece because it would spread misinformation.
The part where they knew their actions would go a long ways to potentially destroying the ad-based satire publication.
That's not fact checking.
And Snopes knew exactly what the consequences were on FB based on their “fact checking” work.
So a satire site making fun of how badly the mainstream news spins things got punished for “lying” because Snopes told Facebook they were lying.
If you read the original linked article, it is clear that they had to manually go in and select the articles that they believed were false and people shouldn’t be allowed to see anymore. They could have simply put up their article, without calling down FB’s wrath on the satire site, but they didn’t.
Are you saying you've never, ever seen anyone mistake an Onion piece for real news? I see it all the time, usually from uneducated people, racists, and new-age moonbats.
> Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof of the ongoing political brouhaha over alleged news media “bias” and “fake news,” some readers missed that aspect of the article and interpreted it literally. But the site’s footer gives away the Babylon Bee’s nature by describing it as “Your Trusted Source For Christian News Satire,” and the site has been responsible for a number of other (usually religious-themed) spoofs that have been mistaken for real news articles.
So, looking at your complaints again:
- The article _is_ false, it's just also satire, as Snopes points out.
- That is a claim. See above.
- Instructing FB on the truthfulness of media _was literally their job_.
- What are you talking about.
- Yes, they checked facts in this case.
> The part that says a satire article is "false."
it doesn't say that a satire article is "false", it says the "claim" is.
> The part labelling the following sentence a "claim":
> "CNN invested in an industrial-sized washing machine to help their journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication."
I'm confused here. Why is this an issue? They are going to fact check whether the claim is true or not. In this case, appears rather than prove CNN didn't, they're going with the "it's satire, people" approach. As is a vast majority of their content, it isn't about the site hosting the content so much as debunking the "claim" to include the initial purpose of debunking/confirming urban legends.
> The part where they instructed FB to stop allowing people to see this satire piece because it would spread misinformation.
They instructed Facebook? Seemed more like Snopes funnels FB data and FB does with it what it sees fit.
> The part where they knew their actions would go a long ways to potentially destroying the ad-based satire publication.
They provided data. Again, kind of on Facebook in this particular case.
> That's not fact checking.
I think they do a fine job fact checking. Where they probably overstepped was in thinking or at least agreeing to the prospect that their data was ready to be made sense of by a non-human user: I can go onto the linked article and can easily infer that CNN bought a washing machine to spin news is bogus and I can also get from it very obviously that the original post it comes from is a joke in the spirit of The Onion, Hard Times, or any other parody site.
And actually, back to the "false-by-means-of-satire": I don't think that'd work. Reason being is that I imagine it is the message "CNN buys washer to spin news" that is labeled as false. Whether someone linking to the original parody or if I created jsgosnews.cc and copied the original's content as a quote (with attribution. Actually, just kidding, because most of these "fake news" sites don't include original attribution as it'd probably expose themselves as bogus too easily) and linked to that. We know the original was stated in jest, but what if mine is claimed as if it was dead serious and that CNN really did this. How does the false, but satire work now?
Again, at least in my opinion, Snopes is doing it the right way. Maybe they need to rethink how (or even if they will ever again) be a fact checking data aggregation service, but I don't see a solution to allow it to truly be the be all, end all solution. So as such, I think they should just continue doing what they're doing.
Stories Snopes fact-checked from that 'Christian Satire Site': https://www.snopes.com/tag/babylon-bee/
At least half of them would be believed by those who trust the Federalist.
Secondly, partisan or not, the Federalist was not the one Snopes was unfairly attacking. They simply reported on the effects of the Snopes attack on a satire site.
Now, what Facebook did with that was not good, and I can see why Snopes would want to get out of such a system.