[beerandt]

>But for whatever reason, people ask them to look into it.

Maybe because a false rating leads to being buried by Google and Facebook. That's a legitimate motive.

Asking for someone or something to be investigated isn't necessarily a de-facto innocence excuse.

[TheHypnotist]

I think poor satire is to blame for being buried, not snopes. When the lines are blurred between misinformation and satire, and a relatively unknown satire website with an obvious agenda produces articles that walk that line, maybe they have it coming because simply put, they aren't very good.

[dev_dull]

> Actual headline: "Did CNN Purchase an Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News"

What line does this walk? Things that are even physically possible and things that are not? I just can't believe Snopes dedicated cycles to debunking this.

Thankfully it got some press and they changed the label to "satire". I can't tell exactly when because the snopes link has been excluded from the way back machine (for whatever reason).

[beerandt]

Not necessarily. Some of it is bad, certainly.

But a lot just turns on being juxtaposed against a prerequisite belief that's not universal. If you don't share that belief, it won't be funny to you. That doesn't (necessarily) make it bad satire.

[TheHypnotist]

Sure, and I'm trying to be objective but I believe my assertion is universal. If your content is poor, your return is poor.

Perhaps the publication should look inward, not outward, and realize the lines between misinformation and satire are paper thin. Somehow, and perhaps its branding, The Onion manages to maintain humor and absurdity with very little room for interpreting it's content as anything but satire.

[beerandt]

But that's not a decision to be made by Snopes, based on a supposed fact-check.

There are plenty of people who don't find the onion, at all. It's not a justification for blacklisting them as fake news.

[dkonofalski]

>blacklisting them as fake news

The Onion is, literally, fake news regardless of whether one finds them funny or not. The question is whether people think it's true not whether they think it's funny and that's the only decision being made by a fact-check.

[beerandt]

So is Babylon Bee. Yet different standards were and are being applied.

[dragonwriter]

> because a false rating leads to being buried by Google and Facebook

If Facebook and/or Google punish a satire site for having articles marked false by a fact-checker, that's a problem with Facebook and/or Google for responding improperly to fact-check of satire, not a problem with the fact-checker, which is doing exactly their job.

> Asking for someone or something to be investigated isn't necessarily a de-facto innocence excuse.

It is for a fact checker if what is produced is a honest and accurate fact check of the claims presented. It may not be for the questioner if they are trying to game a system where third parties do dumb things based on what fact checkers do, but that's a problem with the questioner and the third parties, not the fact checker.

[beerandt]

>not a problem with the fact-checker

If a fact checker can't (or chooses not to) distinguish satire from news, it very much is a problem with the fact checker, regardless of Facebook or Google's over-reliance on them (right or wrong).

At the time, (until ~Feb 2019) Snopes fact checkers for Facebook were separate from the sites traditional authors. They would have known exactly that what they were doing resulted in blacklisting.

[dragonwriter]

> If a fact checker can't (or chooses not to) distinguish satire from news, it very much is a problem with the fact checker

When Snopes does a fact-check of a claim whose original source is satire, they clearly identify both the source and the satirical nature, so whether or not one were to agree with your hypothetical, it doesn't seem applicable to the actual situation being discussed.

> At the time, (until ~Feb 2019) Snopes fact checkers for Facebook were separate from the sites traditional authors. They would have known exactly that what they were doing resulted in blacklisting.

That's perhaps an argument as to why Snopes should have refused to fact check for Facebook on ethical grounds but, having been employed to do so, it's not a reason they should not have fact checked all claims put before them.

Though social feed including reshares of satirical sources as news is an increasingly important source of “news”, so I’m not sure there's a problem here besides Facebook lacking sufficient AI to distinguish when a story (whether in original presentation or resharing which can alter context and reach less-familiar audiences) is likely to read as news vs. satire by the recipient and only apply any penalty from negative fact check results in the context where it would otherwise be seen as news. This isn't the pre-web (or even pre-social-media) environment where a publication reaches mainly people familiar with it's nature and actively seeking it out, and that's particularly true when the venue is specifically Facebook.