For Snopes.com, a bigger role brings more attacks
THE last line of defence against the torrent of half-truths, untruths and fakery that make up so much of the internet is in a strip mall near the beach.
Snopes.com, the fact-checking website, does not have an office designed to impress, or even be noticed. A big sign outside still bears the name of the previous tenant, a maker of underwater headphones. Inside there’s nothing much – a bunch of improvised desks, a table tennis table, cartons of Popchips and cases of Dr Pepper. It looks like a dot-com on the way to nowhere.
Appearances deceive. This is where the muddled masses come by the virtual millions to establish just what the heck is really going on in a world turned upside down.
Did Donald Trump say on Twitter that he planned to arrest the Saturday Night Live star Alec Baldwin for sedition? Has Hillary Clinton quietly filed for divorce? Was Trump giving Kanye West a Cabinet position? And was Alan Thicke, the star of Growing Pains, really dead?
All untrue, except for the demise of Thicke, which was easily verifiable.
“Rationality seems to have fallen out of vogue,” said Brooke Binkowski, Snopes’ managing editor. “People don’t know what to believe anymore. Everything is really strange right now.”
That is certainly true at Snopes itself. For 20 years, the site was dedicated to urban legends, like the purported existence of alligators in New York City sewers, and other benign misinformation.
But its range and readership increased significantly during a prolonged presidential election campaign in which the facts became a partisan issue and reality itself seemed up for grabs.
One way to chart Snopes’ increasing prominence is by measuring the rise in fake news about the site itself. If you believe the internet, the founder of Snopes, David Mikkelson, has a longer rap sheet than Al Capone. He was supposedly arrested for committing fraud and corruption and running a pit bull ring. In the wake of a deal that Snopes and others made this month to start fact-checking for Facebook, new slurs and allegations poured forth.
The underlying message of these spurious attacks is that the movement to fact-check the internet is a left-wing conspiracy whose real goal is to censor the right, and therefore must be resisted at all costs.
“Smearing people just because you don’t like what they’re saying often works to shut them up,” Binkowski, 39, said. “But at Snopes you learn to grow a thick skin. I will always push back. At least until someone shows up at my workplace and kills me.”
Binkowski, a former radio reporter who still freelances about border issues, thinks there is a mission.
“Not to be ideological or Pollyannaish, but you have to believe this work makes a difference,” she said. “Other- wise you’d just go back to bed and drink.” Although there are other benefits to working at Snopes: “I really like telling people they’re wrong.”
The Snopes writers generally take a long-term perspective on fake news. The practice itself they see as ancient. The difference now is that the stories circulate faster and people can make money spreading them, which gives its purveyors a whole new motivation.
There is also a cultural shift, said Kim LaCapria, who lives on Long Island and writes many of the Snopes political posts.
“It used to be that if you got too far from the mainstream, you were shunned for being a little nutty,” she said. “Now there is so much nutty going around that it’s socially acceptable to embrace wild accusations. No one is embarrassed by anything anymore.”