Snopes Schadenfreude Thread

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Snopes Schadenfreude Thread

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Aug 14, 2021 12:24 pm

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Staff Gutted!

Snopes Retracts 60 Articles Plagiarized by Co-Founder: ‘Our Staff Are Gutted’

The fact-checking site has banned David Mikkelson, who owns half the company, from writing articles after a BuzzFeed News investigation prompted an internal review.


The Snopes co-founder and chief executive David Mikkelson in his home office in Tacoma, Wash., in 2018.Credit...Greg Gilbert/The Seattle Times, via Associated Press

By Heather Murphy
Aug. 13, 2021

Snopes, which has long presented itself as the internet’s premier fact-checking resource, has retracted 60 articles after a BuzzFeed News investigation found that the site’s co-founder plagiarized from news outlets as part of a strategy intended to scoop up web traffic.

“As you can imagine, our staff are gutted and appalled by this,” Vinny Green, the Snopes chief operating officer, said on Friday. He said the Snopes editorial team was conducting a review to understand just how many articles written by David Mikkelson, the site’s co-founder and chief executive, featured content plagiarized from other news sites.

As of Friday afternoon, the team had found 60, he said. By Friday morning, dozens of articles had been removed from the site, with pages that formerly featured those articles now showing the word “retracted” and an explanation that “some or all of its content was taken from other sources without proper attribution.” Ads have been removed from these articles, according to Mr. Green.

Mr. Mikkelson, who owns 50 percent of Snopes Media Group, will continue to be Snopes’s chief executive, but his ability to publish articles has been revoked, Mr. Green said.

In a statement, Mr. Mikkelson acknowledged he had engaged in “multiple serious copyright violations of content that Snopes didn’t have rights to use” and praised the work of the 20 or so “dedicated, professional journalists” employed by Snopes.


“There is no excuse for my serious lapses in judgment,” he wrote, adding, “I want to express how sorry I am to those whose copyright I violated, to our staff, and to our readers.”

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Doreen Marchionni, the managing editor, has been given “full authority” to address these issues, he said.

In an apology to existing staff members posted on Snopes on Friday, Mr. Green and Ms. Marchionni, who has a Ph.D. in journalism from the University of Missouri, called the BuzzFeed News investigation, which accuses their chief executive of intentionally taking credit for other people’s work to drive up web traffic, as “an example of dogged, watchdog journalism we cherish.”

Eight additional members of the editorial staff issued their own statement. “We strongly condemn these poor journalistic practices,” they said.

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The BuzzFeed investigation, which was published Friday, found that from 2015 to 2019 — under the Snopes byline, his own name and another pseudonym — Mr. Mikkelson published dozens of articles that included language that appeared to have been copied directly from The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, the BBC and other news sources. The investigation also identified cases in which entire paragraphs — and in at least one case, nearly an entire article — appeared to have been copied.

Copying text from breaking news stories on other sites was a strategy intended to scoop up traffic, the former Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski told Dean Sterling Jones, the freelance journalist who broke the story for BuzzFeed News.

“That was his big SEO/speed secret,” Ms. Binkowski, who now manages Truth or Fiction, another fact-checking site, told BuzzFeed. “He would instruct us to copy text from other sites, post them verbatim so that it looked like we were fast and could scoop up traffic, and then change the story in real time.”

In a 2016 Slack message that was quoted in the BuzzFeed article, Mr. Mikkelson explicitly outlined this strategy. “Usually when a hot real news story breaks (such as a celebrity death), I just find a wire service or other news story about it and publish it on the site verbatim to quickly get a page up,” he wrote. “Once that’s done, then I quickly start editing the page to reword it and add material from other sources to make it not plagiarized.”

Even if he had rewritten the text a few minutes after publication, that would not be considered ethical under widely accepted journalistic standards. But as both the BuzzFeed investigation and Snopes’s internal investigation found, he frequently never got around to changing the sentences he had stolen.

[...]
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/busi ... elson.html



Post your Snopes favorites here!

This one is still up...

Fact Checks
September 11th

Did Saudis Fly Out of the U.S. While Airspace Was Still Closed after 9/11?

Rumor holds that a secret flight whisked prominent Saudis and Osama bin Laden's relatives out of the USA during a ban on air travel.

David Mikkelson
Published 31 March 2002

Claim
Secret flights whisked bin Laden family members and Saudi nationals out of the U.S. immediately after September 11 while a general ban on air travel was still in effect, and before the FBI had any opportunity to question any of the passengers.

RATING: FALSE
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/flights-of-fancy/

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I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Snopes Schadenfreude Thread

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Aug 14, 2021 12:32 pm

Image


Unfortunately it's a game of "whack-a-mole". For every "fact checker" that gets exposed (at least in a manner that can be presented to the rubes), numerous others will spring up (and indeed, many others have sprung up, along a parallel upward-moving trajectory with the volume/frequency of increasingly blatant propaganda. Not coincidental).
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Re: Snopes Schadenfreude Thread

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Aug 14, 2021 12:59 pm

Also:

Not to raise former 'forum favorites' from their [earned] demise, but this example should elicit a hearty chuckle:

Jerky » Mon Jul 31, 2017 3:12 am wrote:If your social media presence is in any way political, you've probably noticed one or more of your "conservative" friends linking to stories trying to push the notion that Snopes.com is nothing more than a hopelessly biased source of left-wing propaganda, and that anyone using their work to debunk lies or correct errors can therefore by justly ignored.

It's bullshit of course. Numerous good faith investigations conducted by a variety of groups using a wide range of metrics have found that Snopes.com is, by every measure, the LEAST biased source of information on the Internet.

...
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The LEAST biased source of information on the Internet!!!

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Aug 14, 2021 4:13 pm

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That's hilarious.

I may have allowed this site to turn into a right-wing cesspool at times, but I can't regret the purge that freed us of the fake leftist flood squad reposting CIA talking points all week long.

But your friend or whomever J. was citing as though you had approved them was wrong in the typical American way: adopting the deception that the corporate media (or in this case, their opportunistic echo at Snopes) = 'liberal' = 'left'. Rendering these terms meaningless or opposite to their original meanings is the prime confusionism, central to our ideological system. Witness all the people declaring that the ongoing global takeover attempt by the most predatory and possibly most genocidal (big competition on both scores) segment of capital is the advent of COMMUNISM, brought to you by that commie Joe Biden, just as Obama implemented SOCIALISM. Such beliefs are an American anomaly (nowadays, mostly) and go back at least to John Birch if not Red Scare I.

Anyway, back to topic:

What I can't find right now but haven't forgotten is Snopes's occasional resort to reposting patriotic speeches by U.S. military officers, e.g. an opinion piece ca. 2002 upholding American goodness and the Afghanistan invasion as a benevolent and restrained response. Snopes inserts these under the pretext that the Internet is wondering whether a given text is 'authentic'. So the 'fact check' is to confirm that it was written by the author that it was written by.

RATING: TRUE
That's right, Col. Muckymuck Patriot First Class really did write the pious imperialist homilies delivered under his byline! SHOCKER!

Funny thing, they never do this for pieces that go viral if they were previously published at Counterpunch or WSWS or even Current Affairs. ;-)

Easy job if you can figure out how to get paid for it, and the joke is on us as usual. Mikkelson has probably invested well and made off with plenty. Now he can write lousy novels under a pseudonym. The 'crime' he's been nailed for is relatively tame and routine, compared to how Snopes pioneered the Internet 'fact-checking' political commissar scam at a crucial time in the early 2000s, and the disinfo function it has usually played. (Caveat: They're great at refuting false bigfoot sitings and establishing that the Earth is, in fact, a sphere, so don't get me wrong.) Hell, we do the same copy-paste thing here, except WE POST THE LINKS and don't claim to have written it ourselves. The company is unlikely to be tanked by it. Watch for Snopes to be bought by one of the conglomerates looking to beef up their 'fact checking' offerings -- ka-ching for the former Mikkelsons -- and, if it happens, six months later, watch for the Snopes staff to learn what 'gutted' REALLY means!

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: The LEAST biased source of information on the Internet!!

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Aug 14, 2021 6:33 pm

.

An emphatic yes to all above, though this bit in particular is precisely on target:

JackRiddler » Sat Aug 14, 2021 3:13 pm wrote:
But your friend or whomever J. was citing as though you had approved them was wrong in the typical American way: adopting the deception that the corporate media (or in this case, their opportunistic echo at Snopes) = 'liberal' = 'left'. Rendering these terms meaningless or opposite to their original meanings is the prime confusionism, central to our ideological system. Witness all the people declaring that the ongoing global takeover attempt by the most predatory and possibly most genocidal (big competition on both scores) segment of capital is the advent of COMMUNISM, brought to you by that commie Joe Biden, just as Obama implemented SOCIALISM. Such beliefs are an American anomaly (nowadays, mostly) and go back at least to John Birch if not Red Scare I.
.


Confusionism is rampant -- it is perhaps the one unifying attribute shared across all political spectrums (though perhaps most common among those subscribing to the standard tropes/talking points of CNN/MSNBC on one 'side' or FOX 'news' on the other). This isn't applicable among the canny & nuanced readership of RI, of course. :sarcasm

At my next spot of spare time will need to track down some of the Snopes top 10 'corrections', though for now many of the covid-related 'fact-checks' will surely qualify.
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Re: Snopes Schadenfreude Thread

Postby Karmamatterz » Fri Aug 20, 2021 1:13 pm

This is a good find, thanks for posting.
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