We honestly surprised it took nearly three years to get a Snopes submission!
In case you need it, here’s the description of Snopes from their Wikipedia entry:
Snopes.com /ˈsnoʊps/, also known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a website covering urban legends, Internet rumors, e-mail forwards, and other stories of unknown or questionable origin.[2] It is a well-known resource for validating and debunking such stories in American popular culture,[3] receiving 300,000 visits a day.[4]
Snopes.com was created by Barbara and David Mikkelson, a California couple who met in the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup.[5] The site is organized by topic and includes a message board where stories and pictures of questionable veracity may be posted.
Let us be clear on one thing: We are happy to have people question Snopes.
Why?
Because we here at Real or Satire want you to think critically. Demand sources. And then demand sources of those sources.
And there are scores of hit-pieces on Snopes. Most of them come mainly from sites who have had one of their stories challenged and debunked by Snopes. Some are quite angry about it (Angry Patriot Movement, Your News Wire, Daily Caller) while others at least don’t break character (The Peoples Cube.)
Snopes has their own hit-piece . . . on itself! They post E-mails that they’ve allegedly received that show that people of all political leanings accuse Snopes of bias. Snopes themselves bemoans:
According to our readership, we’re all those things — from what they tell us, we’ve performed the remarkable feat of being decidedly biased in every possible direction:
FactCheck.org has a pretty sizable albeit older article about Snopes, which ends with this healthy bit of advice:
The e-mail’s last paragraph advises that everyone who goes to Snopes.com for “the bottom line facts” should “proceed with caution.” We think that’s terrific advice, not just in connection with material on Snopes but for practically anything a reader finds online — including articles on FactCheck.org. The very reason we list our sources (as does Snopes.com) and provide links is so that readers can check things out for themselves.
That said, be warned: Snopes does have a section that’s a section of urban legends completely (as best they know) made up by them, called “The Repository of Lost Legends.” Get it?
A Snopes piece over on NetworkWorld.com wrote it best:
[…T]he Mikkelsons make no claim to infallibility and insist that their highest objective is to help convince people to think critically about what they hear and read … and to do their own fact checking.
In the end, that’s what sites like Snopes (and ultimately Real or Satire) want readers to do: think!
