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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

Snopes has been used against right wing sites and in favour of left wing controversies. For example, they labelled a clearly satire site Babylon Bee as "fake news". Downplaying Antifa violence. And outright lying about a woman being punched in the face who was throwing glass bottles. I'm pretty sure there are more cases but those come up with a quick search.

Note: I'm not from USA/UK, not white, not right wing, I think Trump is unqualified to say the least. But Snopes, like many other sites, is no longer unbiased or objective. So long.

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It says a lot about the current political climate when people feel the need to add a disclaimer like that.

https://www.reddit.com/domain/babylonbee.com/

Clearly many right and alt right subreddits are taking stories from there seriously, including r/conservative.

https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/duy4x5/nazi...

Look at the comments there.

In only a few places it's marked as Satire. They publish a very agenda driven news that's taken literally very commonly, unlike the Onion which is well known to be satire and does not have an overt extreme bias.

It's a very good call to call it fake news since mainstream social media is taking it for real.

I spent about five minutes reading the discussion at your r/JordanPeterson link. While I see the link has spurred some substantive discussion stemming from the "ha ha only serious" Babylon Bee article, I'm not seeing anyone confused that this is real news.

Doesn't seem to be unlike HN where we basically just kneejerk respond to titles and titles are more like open-ended writing prompts for us that mainly have the purpose of introducing a topic like "javascript sucks" or "weight loss is just CICO" or whichever hobby horses we have chomping at the bit.

Babylon Bee is also well known to be satire. I would also say it doesn't have an "extreme" bias. It's about as far right of center as the Onion is far left, which is to say some, but not particularly extreme.

> Clearly many right and alt right subreddits are taking stories from there seriously, including r/conservative.

The entire subreddit r/atetheonion is dedicated to people believing Onion articles. Bablylon Bee is not unique in this regard.

I think this is the bias people are generally referring to here. The Babylon Bee isn't extreme in its partisan leaning, and is a popular satirical site. But because that lean is right, rather than left, it gets painted as more extreme, or people feel that there is some kind of more pressing need to label it as satire.

It indicates that the "fact checkers" may be in a bubble of their own and are failing to account for their biases appropriately.

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