We do not pick and choose which items to address at Snopes.com based on personal preference or political leanings or our own viewpoint of what’s “important.” We address whatever the largest segment of the audience is asking about or questioning at any given time, as derived from a variety of inputs (e.g., emails, site searches, web trends). We don’t make any judgments about whether what the audience is questioning is important or obvious or frivolous — if people are asking us about something, there’s a reason why, and our job is to take whatever they’re questioning and help them sort out what’s true about it and what isn’t.
Items that originated as humor or satire often breach our topic-selection threshold, even articles that are seemingly so ridiculous in concept and/or so thoroughly labeled as being humorous or satiric that nobody could possibly mistake them for something else. We’ve had to reassure our readers that 1990s-era Beanie Babies toys were not stuffed with brown recluse spider eggs that began hatching 20 years later, that a dog pictured with a slice of ham on its face was not badly burned and in need of medical treatment, and that SeaWorld would not be drowning a live elephant as part of a new attraction.
These examples, as absurd as they may seem on the surface, are not outliers or aberrations — they are some of the most massively viral “Is this true?” subjects we’ve ever undertaken. They put the lie to common refrains about “obvious humor,” “obvious satire,” “obvious jokes,” or “obvious” anything else. Quite evidently nothing can be put online — no matter how preposterous in concept or plainly labeled it might be — that some people won’t believe to be true (or at least allow might be true). And since everything put online has the potential to reach billions of people, even if only a very small percentage of the global audience misunderstands it, that percentage may still represent a very large number of people.
