Snopes is truly disappointing and slanted. It’s early days it was a good reference tool… sadly in our divided times Snopes has clearly a political slant.
Why is that an example? Plenty of ex-whatever-religion (or even ex-particular-denomination) people turn right into the most extreme and hateful bigots against the group they departed.
It’s a frequently commented on phenomenon among religious people, often not focussing on betrayal by departing members (where the bias of attachment to their own identity group might make them prone to overperceive) but on the trend among converts to their own religion.
It would be weird if a group tracking hateful religious bigots systematically excluded former members of the targeted religious group from the label.
Do you really think that ex-Muslims are irrationally fearful of Muslims? Or, perhaps is handwaving away as "phobia" a cop out to any criticism at all?
EDIT: Seems like it still works, just call someone a phobe or an ist and instantly shut down any criticism. There are no ex-Muslims with valid issues against Islam because they're just bigoted, obviously. Use whatever word games you need in order to shut down conversation. Pretty interesting coming from the same people that say they care about women, gay, and minority rights.
The use of “-phobe” as a suffix with the meaning “bigot against” (rooted originally in the belief that bigotry is tied to fear, but now operating largely independent of any assumption of the basis of the particular bigotry) is pretty well-established in English; the main case where its not used are for gender-based bigotry where the “mis—ist” circumfix is used around an existing Greek root.
Now, me, I like my organizations to never admit-- uh, I mean make mistakes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maajid-...
In this article, Snopes attempts to disprove the claim that the wave of refugees arriving in Europe in 2016 were mostly young and male by:
1. Cherry picking stats showing that Syrian refugees worldwide had an even gender ratio. This gender ratio does not hold when you examine Syrian (and non-Syrian) refugees arriving specifically in Europe: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2016/08/02/4-asylum-seeke...
2. Picking one specific photo to "debunk".
This seems to be the general strawman technique used by Snopes on political topics, as most critics of the 2016 refugee wave were specifically talking about refugees arriving Europe, whereas Snopes broadened the scope to the entire world in order to "debunk" that claim.
However, prosecutors dropped those charges in 1990 as part of a plea deal involving other suspects in the bombings. As a result, Rosenberg was never tried or convicted on any charges relating to the 1983-1985 bombing campaign. The claim, made in @asdomke’s tweet, that Rosenberg was “convicted of” several 1983 bombings, was therefore false. The claim in the headline of an article on Wayne Dupree’s website that Rosenberg “carried out” the bombings stands in contrast to the fact that she was never tried or convicted in relation to those incidents.
During her 16-year incarceration, Rosenberg renounced the use of political violence, though her political beliefs appear not to have changed significantly. In a radio interview shortly after her release in January 2001, she said she “rejects” the “potential for violence in my past actions,” saying her view of violence as a strategic tool had undergone an “enormous change,” but that she retained “a political view that is certainly progressive and radical in a certain sense.”
Certainly someone who reads only the original partisan sources and NOT Snopes is going to be less informed about the truth. You'd admit that much, right?
The question is now whether you can find similar "right-friendly" stories that show a similar "hesitation" in the labelling. Probably you can.
Although, is it really that the question? We have known that "both sides" have been bullshitting their way for ages. It's not as if this is a secret.
The only reason that people care about Snopes having a political slant is because 1: it is popular and 2: it pretends that it is not (by being a fact checker). I am not aware of any similar popular and generally considered credible right wing site.
I would be interested if there are examples of conservative topics where they have either been as hair-splitting as in this example or if they were not as hair-splitting.
But the second one looks just plain correct. Here we are 5 months later and no Biden-mandated federal vaccine passports, after all.
Would a reasonable person consider a person who was a member of a terrorist group that bombed the senate and was subsequently convicted of being in possession of large amounts of explosives and firearms a domestic terrorist? I think it's an emphatic yes.
It's like arguing that a man caught by police attempting to have sex with a 16 year old girl from the internet shouldn't be considered a sexual predator because he didn't succeed and there is no single universally-agreed definition for the age of consent.
Flip it on its head: can you claim with a straight face that "She was convicted for the 1983 bombing of the United States Capitol Building, The US Naval War College and the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Assoc" is not a blatant lie? It's a straightforward claim that would've been trivial to verify and correct before by the person who tweeted it, without even losing THAT much impact towards the argument they want to make, yet... they didn't.
So to establish bias... do we know of any right-wing terrorist-esque folks that Snopes is either less or more wishy-washy on? Seems like too specific a scenario to find anything direct on, the closes I can come up with is something like https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kelly-loeffler-kkk-member-... . There's a somewhat-close comparison https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-kkk-klan-wizard/ here but the part claimed false there is the exaggerated claim of "grand wizard."
(And are we agreeing that the Biden/vaccination one shows no bias at all?)