{"id":110816,"date":"2016-12-26T14:28:11","date_gmt":"2016-12-26T22:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=110816"},"modified":"2016-12-26T14:36:55","modified_gmt":"2016-12-26T22:36:55","slug":"fact-checking-snopes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=110816","title":{"rendered":"Fact-Checking Snopes"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Chateau<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Faceborg’s Mark Cuckersperg, smarting like a bruised betabuttboy from leftoid legacy media criticism that his platform aids in the dissemination of “fake news” (i.e., real news that doesn’t recapitulate the anti-White narrative), announced that the Winklevoss’s company would team up with a selection of “fact-checking” outfits to curate news feeds on Facedork and identify those deemed “fake” for immediate relocation to the gulag of criminal thoughts.<\/p>\n

The reaction from the reactoshitsphere was pointed: but who will check the fact-checkers?<\/p>\n

It’s a valid question. A working familiarity with fact-check websites reveals a decided leftoid slant. The owners of those sites will never admit to this bias, of course, but the facts (heh) bear it out<\/a>. Media-darling “fact-checkers” are almost all leftoids.<\/p>\n

Soccermombook listed Snopes as one of the four or five “fact-checkers” with whom they would collaborate to censor alt-right speech. Snopes is a popular “debunking” website favored by shitlibs, but there’s something everyone should know about the Snopes proprietors.<\/p>\n

First, a wholesome photo of Snopes co-founders, David and Barbara Mikkelson (with obligatory libcat child substitute).<\/p>\n

\"snopesfirstwife\"<\/p>\n

This smug libfag would give Pajamaboy a run for Most Punchable Shitlib Face<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Our Snopes story took a darkly humorous turn, when news from America’s foremost paper of record recently surfaced<\/a> that David Mikkelson divorced his first wife and is accused of embezzling $100K from his company to spend on prostitutes and on his second wife, a chubby ho who is (still!) an escort and a former porn star, (“star” being used loosely here… literally loosely).<\/p>\n

The second wife, Elyssa Young:<\/p>\n

\"snopessecondwife\"<\/p>\n

\n

Now a DailyMail.com investigation reveals that Snopes.com’s founders, former husband and wife David and Barbara Mikkelson, are embroiled in a lengthy and bitter legal dispute in the wake of their divorce.<\/p>\n

He has since remarried, to a former escort and porn actress who is one of the site’s staff members.<\/p>\n

They are accusing each other of financial impropriety, with Barbara claiming her ex-husband is guilty of ’embezzlement’ and suggesting he is attempting a ‘boondoggle’ to change tax arrangements, while David claims she took millions from their joint accounts and bought property in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

David Mikkelson told the Dailymail.com that Snopes does not have a \u2018standardized procedure\u2019 for fact-checking \u2018since the nature of this material can vary widely.\u2019 He said the process \u2018involves multiple stages of editorial oversight, so no output is the result of a single person\u2019s discretion.\u2019<\/p>\n

He also said the company has no set requirements for fact-checkers because the variety of the work \u2018would be difficult to encompass in any single blanket set of standards.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You’ve been FACT CHECKED, bitches!<\/p>\n

It’ll be fun reading Snopebook try to “fact-check” and censor inconvenient FBI crime stats by race and well-tested group IQ differences. Assuming, that is, Snopes isn’t quietly jettisoned as a potential Facesperg client, losing out on millions of middle-aged fatty escort-purchasing dollars.<\/p>\n

Just when I think 2016 can’t deliver any more Trump-branded goodness, the next day brings a fresh batch of WINNING.<\/p>\n

PS The Mikkelsons (second iteration) have a wedding website<\/a>, where you can fact check the size of Elyssa’s upper arms.<\/p>\n

PPS There are 147 reviews on Elyssa’s heavily-airbrushed escort service website<\/a>, all of them positive. (Imagine that!) You have to wonder at the level of emasculation needed to happily wife up an actual whore (and single mom) who continues flaunting the carousel of cock she rode, and still rides, on her escort blog.<\/p>\n

PPPS The Mikkelson-Young wedding party is a glimpse into the lives of socially atomized prototypical shitlibs:<\/p>\n

\"snopesweddingparty\"<\/p>\n

Bridesmen and groomswomen. The gay is strong in this wedding. The best man was the bride’s stepfather. Sad and solitary David Mikkelson needs a friend-check. And a family check. The only people he knows willing to be his “groomswomen” are his employees. He has to pay for witnesses to his wedding.<\/p>\n

PPPPS MPC has an entertaining thread<\/a> on this story.<\/p>\n

* She accused him of embezzling money for himself and his hoes. Here’s how he justified that:
\nQuote
\nDavid and his attorneys countered that the India visit was a legitimate business trip, and that he only expensed a fraction – 22.5 per cent – of the total cost of the excursion.
\nHe said he was considering setting up a fact-checking website in India, and wanted to get a sense of the culture. He also said he went to Buenos Aires to attend an international fact-checking conference.<\/p>\n

PLEASE TO BE INVESTIGATING THE REPORTS OF FRAUDULENT POOP IN THE STREETS<\/p>\n

Quote
\nDavid kept their joint baseball card collection, a savings account with $1.59 million balance, and other savings worth more than $300,000. They also agreed to split the company checking account’s $240,000 balance at the end of 2015 after his salary had been paid and a $50,000 float left.<\/p>\n

Daily Mail sneaks in some low blows of its own:
\nQuote
\nThat has not ended the difficulty however; court documents show that a decision on David’s salary for 2016 became bogged down in legal argument when Barbara refered it to an arbiter, and the appointment of the arbiter became itself a matter of dispute.
\nSnopes.com will be asked by Facebook to be an arbiter on the veracity of news.
\nAttorneys for the former husband and wife also conducted a lengthy exchange on what was actually true about the actions of the former couple.<\/p>\n

Finally, the new Snopes’ main fact checker is a dominatrix who runs a smutty web site dedicated to smut. She describes her work at Snopes:
\nQuote
\nDescribing her day-off activities on another blog, she wrote that she ‘played scrabble, smoked pot, and posted to Snopes.’ She added, ‘That’s what I did on my day “on,” too.’<\/p>\n

Yes, yes of course and you knew this was coming:
\nQuote
\nIn others posts, LaCapria claimed to be ‘addicted to smutty HP [Harry Potter] fanfic.’<\/p>\n

* His new wife may STILL WORKING AS AN ESCORT, her website is still up, so is her Twitter. <\/p>\n

Her rates are ridiculous, does this look like a $500 an hour hooker to you? <\/p>\n

* That whole Snopes thing started on usenet, where people with academic connections could status signal against folklore.urban. It was a way they could show their superiority to normies, dittoheads and AOL account holders. Then it moved to the web and became an institution. It was always SWPL-liberal but it was at least useful in combating that forwarded crap your relatives would email you. <\/p>\n

Now the whole thing is like a bad 1980s televangelist scandal.<\/p>\n

* A wedding where your wife’s sons are the Bridesmen (and have different last names), your Groomswomen are your employees, and where the terms “Bridesmam” and “Groomswoman” exist at all… it’s like some bad parody of nerds except it’s all very real<\/p>\n

Goons and nerds like the idea they own truth and get to define what it is, since they have precious little else to feel valuable about in their lives. Hence why they like compiling lists of information (like Snopes).<\/p>\n

Being the weak willed creatures they are, they couldn’t help but get co-opted by political operatives acting in bad faith to use up what little credibility they had to further their own ends. Good luck being cited anymore, Snopes. <\/p>\n

* Most men don’t expect to marry a virgin these days but imagine if your wife had 147 reviews on an escort review website, in Elyssa’s case they’re almost universally positive but that would only invoke more suspicion, if she’s so good at pleasing men then how would you know if she really loves you or not? <\/p>\n

* The whore that is addicted to Harry Potter erotica which features explicit sex scenes between adults and children debunked PizzaGate? Brava. <\/p>\n

* The best response to the “fake news” theory is that mass reporting is made up of multiple levels and that the bottom level, the phony articles passed around on Facebook, is relatively benign compared to the corruption at the higher levels. In fact, the idea that “fake news elected Donald Trump” is itself a kind of fake news, a partisan talking point used to delegitimize election results and make excuses for the no-message, no-energy Hillary campaign.<\/p>\n

The major media sources have all acquitted themselves terribly over this campaign, from deliberately pumping up Trump early on because they thought Hillary could beat him to collaborating with campaigns to printing egregiously slanted “analysis” and attempting coordinated hits. Of course the media does not report on its own revolving door problem, it no longer even bothers observing that George Stephanopolis was a key figure in the Clinton administration, or that most reporters identify as liberal, or that media culture is itself stridently liberal and works closely with liberal groups while keeping conservative groups at arm’s length. <\/p>\n

FORBES<\/a>: Thus, when I reached out to David Mikkelson, the founder of Snopes, for comment, I fully expected him to respond with a lengthy email in Snopes\u2019 trademark point-by-point format, fully refuting each and every one of the claims in the Daily Mail\u2019s article and writing the entire article off as \u201cfake news.\u201d
\nIt was with incredible surprise therefore that I received David\u2019s one-sentence response which read in its entirety \u201cI’d be happy to speak with you, but I can only address some aspects in general because I’m precluded by the terms of a binding settlement agreement from discussing details of my divorce.\u201d
\nThis absolutely astounded me. Here was the one of the world\u2019s most respected fact checking organizations, soon to be an ultimate arbitrator of \u201ctruth\u201d on Facebook, saying that it cannot respond to a fact checking request because of a secrecy agreement.
\nIn short, when someone attempted to fact check the fact checker, the response was the equivalent of \u201cits secret.\u201d
\nIt is impossible to understate how antithetical this is to the fact checking world, in which absolute openness and transparency are necessary prerequisites for trust. How can fact checking organizations like Snopes expect the public to place trust in them if when they themselves are called into question, their response is that they can\u2019t respond.
\nWhen I presented a set of subsequent clarifying questions to David, he provided responses to some and not to others. Of particular interest, when pressed about claims by the Daily Mail that at least one Snopes employee has actually run for political office and that this presents at the very least the appearance of potential\u00a0bias in Snopes\u2019 fact checks, David responded \u201cIt’s pretty much a given that anyone who has ever run for (or held) a political office did so under some form of party affiliation and said something critical about their opponent(s) and\/or other politicians at some point. Does that mean anyone who has ever run for office is manifestly unsuited to be associated with a fact-checking endeavor, in any capacity?\u201d
\nThat is actually a fascinating response to come from a fact checking organization that prides itself on its claimed neutrality. Think about it this way \u2013 what if there was a fact checking organization whose fact checkers were all drawn from the ranks of Breitbart and Infowars? Most liberals would likely dismiss such an organization as partisan and biased. Similarly, an organization whose fact checkers were all drawn from Occupy Democrats and Huffington Post might be dismissed by conservatives as partisan and biased. In fact, when I asked several\u00a0colleagues for their thoughts on this issue this morning, the unanimous response back was that people with strong self-declared political leanings on either side should not be a part of a fact checking organization and all had incorrectly assumed that Snopes would have felt the same way and had a blanket policy against placing partisan\u00a0individuals as fact checkers.
\nIn fact, this is one of the reasons that fact checking organizations must be transparent and open. If an organization like Snopes feels it is ok to hire partisan employees who have run for public office on behalf of a particular political party and employ them as fact checkers where they have a high likelihood of being asked to weigh in on\u00a0material aligned with or contrary to\u00a0their views, how can they reasonably be expected to act as neutral arbitrators of the truth?
\nPut another way, some Republicans believe firmly that climate change is a falsehood and that humans are not responsible in any way for climatic change. Those in the scientific community might object to an anti-climate change Republican serving as a fact checker for climate change stories at Snopes and flagging every article about a new scientific study on climate change as fake news. Yet, we have no way of knowing the biases of the fact checkers at Snopes \u2013 we simply have to trust that the site\u2019s views on what constitutes neutrality are the same as ours.
\nWhen I asked for comment on the specific detailed criteria Snopes uses to screen its applicants and decide who to hire as a fact checker, surprisingly David demurred, saying only\u00a0that the site looks for applicants across all fields and skills. He specifically did not provide any detail of any kind regarding the screening process and how Snopes evaluates potential hires. David also did not respond to further emails asking whether, as part of the screening process, Snopes has applicants fact check a set of articles to evaluate their reasoning and research skills and to gain insight into their thinking process.
\nThis was highly unexpected, as I had assumed that a fact checking site as reputable as Snopes would have a detailed written formal evaluation process for new fact checkers that would include having them perform a set of fact checks and include a lengthy set of interview questions designed to assess their ability to identify potential or perceived conflicts of interest and work through potential biases.
\nEven more strangely, despite asking in two separate emails how Snopes assesses its fact checkers and whether it performs intra- and inter-rater reliability assessments, David responded only that fact checkers work together collaboratively and did not respond to further requests for more detail and did not answer whether Snopes uses any sort of assessment scoring or ongoing testing process to assess its fact checkers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Chateau: Faceborg’s Mark Cuckersperg, smarting like a bruised betabuttboy from leftoid legacy media criticism that his platform aids in the dissemination of “fake news” (i.e., real news that doesn’t recapitulate the anti-White narrative), announced that the Winklevoss’s company … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110816"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110822,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110816\/revisions\/110822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}