Never liked their liberal bias for many of the things they report where the truth of something cannot be ascertained. I won't be donating.
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wow, didn't know there was this many snopes lovers on here. Got downvoted to hell. Funny thing is, Silicon Valley's leadership/VCs is extremely conservative, yet the people who work for them, namely lots of people who read HN aren't... weird.
The guidelines ask us to not complain about downvotes, and it's especially important that we don't make generalizations about the community at the same time. It's mere provocation and doesn't help us towards the kind of thoughtful discussion we're after here.
There's a lot of stupidity on both ends of the political spectrum, but the nature of conservatism seems more prone to conspiracy generation because it's essentially a bunch of political viewpoints that culminate to: government is bad.
Everything from chemtrails to roswell and the moon landing hinge on "the government is trying to fool you" rhetoric.
There are plenty of dangerously bad liberal-leaning conspiracy theories (liberals and conservatives share fault for anti-vax), but it seems fairly obvious that conservative-based theories outpace them in volume.
> the nature of conservatism seems more prone to conspiracy generation
True, but probably not for the reason you describe. Anxiety is a prominent undertone in conservative psychology [1]. That is the nexus conservatism shares with conspiracy theories.
(Note that "liberal" and "conservative@ don't neatly map to modern political parties in almost any democracy.)
yeah, as opposed to liberal trash that makes every corporation that hires nearly 100 million Americans evil... I get your point. Perhaps its something about "truth assessment" websites that gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Like others have stated, I'd like some examples of this. I was first introduced to Snopes by a conservative coworker of mine. From everything I've seen of the site, they're pretty good at trying to be neutral.
Oh HN, downvoting what was asked for. This is why nobody likes talking to you about politics and you think your minority opinions are the majority.
>One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter. - What I Heard From Trump Supporters, sama.
> The fact that, as the Lichter study shows, "A majority of Democratic statements (54 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely true, compared to only 18 percent of Republican statements," probably has more to do with how the statements were picked and the subjective bias of the fact checker involved than anything remotely empirical. Likewise, the fact that "a majority of Republican statements (52 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely false, compared to only 24 percent of Democratic statements" probably has more to do with spinning stories than it does with evaluating statements.
2. This article ignores the executive editor's registrations as a Republican and Independent, and doesn't provide any examples of biased Snopes content.
3. This is a nearly fact-free article. The author seems shocked that Snopes doesn't hire unbiased people, but such people don't exist.
I didn't complain about anything, I provided links when someone asked why Snopes is perceived as liberally biased. I get why that's confusing for you though. That's why I included the 3rd link, which addresses, and confirms, the points discussed there from a source that's more palatable to the left.
It's pretty funny really, your comment is indicative of what people perceive as bias. If Carlson's site is somehow off limits for discussion, does that mean that editorials by Maddow, Morning Joe & Mika, Anderson Cooper, etc, are all worthless due to their bias? Or are only right wing sources ok to completely write off?
Eh whatever, the way they act is neutering the left for years to come and they don't even see it. It's pretty funny to watch at this point. Don't worry 2018 will be great!!! Referendum!!!
You're honestly going to confirm bias by not changing the frame of reference? Man, you better not hope to be a lawyer in this lifetime with that mindset
Yeah, there's no journalistic standards over there (and granted I don't think they ever claimed otherwise). Snopes tries to be a debunker, but for political matters, it'll just be debunking in favor of whoever wrote the particular article.
Great for chain letters and virus alerts, but there are probably better places to find out the truth behind the latest political outrage circulating among your friends.
Wasn't there some huge thing in the news about one of their political fact checkers being any actual liberal blogger? I seem to remember that from a couple of years back.
But why is that relevant? I (and assume most people) are capable of assuming different modes of writing, including modes devoid of opinion; or with opinion carefully noted as such.
Parent just asked for an example and I remembered that.
People who feel strongly enough about something to write legitimately leaning fluff pieces are not the personality type that I expect to be able to assume writing modes devoid of opinion, personally. I know very few people who aren't considered moderate/independent who I believe could pull that off.
These are the same people who've been proven to disbelieve factual information when it contradicts their world view.
That is the type of person that I would not trust in a "fact checker" position, especially one in which their version of events will be cited by others as "fact".
> With the number of somewhat mysterious deaths now over 100, this article looks like they gave up trying to debunk all these deaths about ten years ago.
That's because the "Clinton Body Count" is an textbook example of a Gish Gallop [1], a bad-faith debating tactic in which charlatans spread nonsense by spewing forth so much of it that opponents have no hope of countering it all with facts.
Interestingly, the comment to which you're responding seems ready to mount its own Gish Gallop: it uses the old "I don't even know where to begin" gambit at the outset.
> Claim: Bill Clinton has quietly done away with several dozen people who possessed incriminating evidence about him.
> Rating: False
I think you're mistaking your own bias for their's. They have 48 people on that list. Are you insisting that there need to be more deaths that need to be debunked in order for that claim to be rated as something other than False? Unless you have a really good argument for a particular name or names, you come off as someone who will never be satisfied.
So to be clear, the one objection you can articulate after your earlier blanket statement is that they've stopped updating a list of crank conspiracy deaths after every one they investigated turned out to be false?
Face it, you want this absurd Clinton conspiracy theory to be true, and you dislike Snopes because they consistently debunk it. That's not bias, that's presenting truth.
In defense of the Clinton body count thing, I think it would be an assassin's number 1 goal to make an assassination seems like anything but, so it would be reasonable that there would be more reasonable explanations for every incident.
Not saying it happened, or any of those deaths were assassinations, but the nature of the claim makes it perniciously difficult to refute.
If a man who couldn't even get away with some consensual foolin' around with an intern without it becoming global news had access to an untraceable assassination force capable of removing people with impunity, how do you explain the fact that so many of his enemies are still alive?
rocks are hard, water's wet... no one denies those facts.
But if someone suggests that Seth Rich shot himself twice in the back of his head..... and Snopes calls it false, does that make Snopes left or right leaning?
How is that quest for "value free facts" going for you?
I think the real point of snopes is that it includes a lot of the information you may want to consider when exploring the truth of something. Is it okay to disagree with Snopes? Sure, but you should indicate what facts it isn't taking into account or which inaccuracies are included in its write up. This lets you have a more substantive discussion than just believing the original claim or just dismissing Snopes as fake news.
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wow, didn't know there was this many snopes lovers on here. Got downvoted to hell. Funny thing is, Silicon Valley's leadership/VCs is extremely conservative, yet the people who work for them, namely lots of people who read HN aren't... weird.