Out of a Tacoma house, Snopes website checks facts, uncovers lies
TACOMA, WASH.» Here, in a 97yearold frame house in the city’s North End, is the headquarters of America’s most popular hoaxdebunking website.
The command center for Snopes.com is an upstairs bedroom with shelving and a laptop placed atop some books and a cardboard box. These are busy times. “Is This a Photograph of Christine Blasey Ford with Bill Clinton?” False.
“Did Protesters Vandalize Brett Kavanaugh’s House?” False.
“Is This a Photograph of a Wasted Brett Kavanaugh?” False.
“Is This a Photograph of Christine Blasey Ford Partying?” False.
All those viral hoaxes, spread by social media, have created a market for factchecking sites, with Snopes, started in 1994, being the champ.
It gets 32 million visits a month on desktop and mobile, according to Similar.web.com, an industry site that measures web traffic. Its closest competitors are The Straight Dope (4 million monthly visits) and Factcheck (3 million).
From his bedroom office, David Mikkelson, Snopes’ publisher and CEO, runs a site employing 16 people across the country, half of them factcheckers and the rest on the business and web side. The company could be run from anywhere with an internet connection, but Mikkelson ended up in Tacoma in 2017 from California after he and his wife, Elyssa Young, bought her parents’ home.
Snopes found a market because the gatekeepers, the mainstream news organizations, went up against the internet, he said.
“The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post. Your crazy cousin’s blog. It all looks the same. A picture with a headline and subject. Before, they were relegated to a soap box on street corners or drafting a newsletter. Now anybody can throw up a website,” says Mikkelson.
Just recently, The Washington Post ran a story headlined “Beware the viral Facebook hoax that’s tricking people into thinking their account was hacked.” It cited Snopes to debunk the hoax.
It used to be that hoaxes tended to be more along the lines of, “Two teens making out in a car hear on the radio about an escaped killer with a hook for a hand. Returning home, they discover a bloody hook hanging from the passengersidedoor handle.” (False.)
Mikkelson says that in Snopes’ early days, debunking such misinformation “was outside what standard news media were doing.”
So Snopes became a goto site, and the more it was cited, the more popular it became. The origin of the name “Snopes” is that it’s a family of characters in the writings of William Faulkner.
In the internet’s early days in the 1980s and ’90s, rumors began spreading through forwarded emails. Social media hadn’t yet arrived. Facebook wasn’t launched until 2004; Twitter until 2006.
Mikkelson, 58, says Snopes took off after 9/11.
“Thousands of Israelis Were Absent from the WTC on 9/11?” False.
“Did Nostradamus Predict the 9/11 Attacks?” False.
After a while, the 9/11 conspiracy theories receded. Then came 2008. Barack Obama ran for president.
“Everything went crazy,” Mikkelson said.
False: “Obama’s Kenyan Certified Registration of Birth.”
False: “Obama Admits He Is a Muslim.”
And it’s stayed political.