Snopes Beclowns Itself

I use Snopes often to find out if the current meme I'm asked to believe on Facebook is meaningful. Unfortunately if I post a link to Snopes instead of a link they used, then more often than not I'm told Snopes is biased. I'm sure they are to an extent.

But when ever I ask to see an example of Snopes bias from a complainer on Facebook, they have nothing. One guy came close when he linked to an article about Snopes bias, but the article was general in nature and did not link to any certain Snopes article.

Ranb
 
smartcooky said:
Agreed

For Brainster's further education

"Unproven
This rating indicates that insufficient evidence exists to establish the given claim as true, but the claim cannot be definitively proved false. This rating typically involves claims for which there is little or no affirmative evidence, but for which declaring them to be false would require the difficult (if not impossible) task of our being able to prove a negative or accurately discern someone else’s thoughts and motivations.​

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check-ratings/

Those of us who like check facts understand how evidence works. (and in any case, why would a Trump supporter even be interested in facts?)
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I like Snopes and I thought it was a good article myself, although I might quibble with the rating. I suspect that some claims there rated "False" in the past haven't been more disproven than this one.

Since they found that the actual picture of "Mrs. Childress" was from a magazine advertisement, does that not prove, at least, that the person making the claim is a liar? I think we can be fairly certain that Colonel Sanders didn't steal the recipe from the woman in the photograph. It's hard to prove a negative, but when you find that the actual photograph is from an advertisement, I think that's enough to rule it out.
 
Surely the photograph provably not being of "Mrs Childress" can't be called evidence that Colonel Sanders didn't steal the recipe from a woman named Mrs Childress.
 
Checkmite said:
Surely the photograph provably not being of "Mrs Childress" can't be called evidence that Colonel Sanders didn't steal the recipe from a woman named Mrs Childress.
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They don't even know her full name or whether she's a "Mrs." or a "Miss".

Think about it.
 
Checkmite said:
I think Brainster seems to take exception to the article pointing out that, historically, white entrepreneurs have been known to take credit for recipes or other fruits of labor or ingenuity by people of color, and would have preferred if Snopes omitted that context altogether and simply declared that the lack of corroborating evidence for this specific claim makes it "false".
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:thumbsup:
 
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Brainster said:
I've never been impressed by Snopes
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Love Snopes. Every time one of my friends copies a post about why we should be mad at some school district, or that there's a missing little girl, Snopes is my first stop.

A picture of a teen holding a sign asking people to share her post so she'd stop being bullied popped up in my thread today. The picture was from 2015 and Snopes went to lengths to track down the exact school and their response back then (which was swift and decisive).

Snopes is your friend.
 
Loss Leader said:
Love Snopes. Every time one of my friends copies a post about why we should be mad at some school district, or that there's a missing little girl, Snopes is my first stop.

A picture of a teen holding a sign asking people to share her post so she'd stop being bullied popped up in my thread today. The picture was from 2015 and Snopes went to lengths to track down the exact school and their response back then (which was swift and decisive).

Snopes is your friend.
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Just never forget "Trust but verify". They are not 100% correct. (And they asserted there are few "intentionally" wrong articles.)
 
Klimax said:
Just never forget "Trust but verify". They are not 100% correct. (And they asserted there are few "intentionally" wrong articles.)
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No, of course not. Everyone makes mistakes.

However, I feel like the criticisms leveled against Snopes in this thread are more properly aimed at reality’s infamous and well known liberal bias.
 
3point14 said:
What's the alternative to the above?
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They investigate all claims?

Well of course they can't do that, so they have to be selective.

I think the real complaint is that they only or mostly check claims made by conservatives (although this one is an exception).
 
Puppycow said:
I think the real complaint is that they only or mostly check claims made by conservatives (although this one is an exception).
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Yes, that is the complaint. One of them, anyway.

Is it a legitimate complaint or does it suggest confirmation bias on the art of the complainer? Are people merely remembering the times Snopes debunked conservative claims and forgetting when they debunked liberal claims? Or, far more often, Snopes mostly debunks non-partisan off-the-wall claims that former high school classmates share on Facebook and politics has nothing to do with it?
 
Upchurch said:
Is it a legitimate complaint or does it suggest confirmation bias on the art of the complainer?
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If they do address conservative-leaning ones more often it may simply be because conservative ones are more common or are shared more often.
 
Brainster said:
I've never been impressed by Snopes; they seem to cherry pick what needs to be investigoogled and what doesn't deserve scrutiny.

In this article, they examine the claim that Colonel Sanders of KFC fame stole his recipe from a black woman named Miss Childress, who is shown in a picture.

Now, despite the fact that Snopes managed to track down the picture (which appears to have been painted for a 1921 advertisement), and despite the fact that they cannot find any mention of Miss Childress or the notion the Colonel Sanders stole his recipe from a black woman, they rule the claim "unproven" although in the subhead that accompanies the article they say "alludes to a deeper truth."
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Yeah, I can't believe they didn't reach a definite conclusion in the absence of definite evidence. What do they think they are, skeptics?
 
jadebox said:
If they do address conservative-leaning ones more often it may simply be because conservative ones are more common or are shared more often.
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Indeed. One glance at Reddit’s r/forwardsfromgrandma and you’ll notice grandma ain’t on the left side of the spectrum.
 
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