I have written previously how the previously-neutral (and maybe even a bit conservative) snopes.com website, which has for several decades now been dedicated to investigating and reporting the veracity of urban legends and other similar stories, seems to have contracted Trump Derangement Syndrome and is now mainly a pro-Democrat anti-Republican anti-Trump website, doing very little of what they were originally known for, and concentrating mostly on one-sided biased politics.
However, they have in fact gone beyond that. Snopes.com is not anymore only a platform that expresses and promotes political opinions. It's an activist organization.
The main difference between just expressing your opinion (and, at the very most, trying to influence the opinions of your audience) and being an activist is whether your activities go beyond just your own platform where you publish your opinions. In other words, when you start actively reaching for other entities, like other people, institutions or companies, when you actively contact them and start to influence their behavior, that's when you start being an activist.
Snopes.com is not content with merely expressing their views, their opinions, and the results of their research on their own website. No, they actively contact other major websites and corporations to influence their actions towards people that they oppose. Thus making them political activists.
And they are quite proud of that, vocally boasting when their activism has had an effect. Consider, for example, their recent article: Facebook Removes Deceptive BL Network Following Snopes' Reporting.
Notice that "following Snopes' reporting" in the very title of the article. They could have left that part out of it, but no. They are so proud of having been the cause for this ban!
And if their motivations to reach for Facebook to have that group banned wasn't made clear, they make it quite clear in the article. Notice the wording:
They could have perfectly well left that "pro-Trump" word out, and the clarity of the sentence would have not been affected. But no. They wanted to make it quite clear why they wanted that group banned from Facebook. They wanted to make it amply clear to their readers that "these are the bad guys; after all, they are pro-Trump!"
Did that group use fraudulent means to get false engagement in Facebook, increasing their visibility? Maybe. Did they deserve to be banned from the platform? That's a complicated question.
However, I think it's quite clear what the actual motivation for Snopes was to actively pursue that particular group to be banned from Facebook. I'm quite certain that there are hundreds and hundreds of similar entities who are using similarly fraudulent means to get visibility on social media, and Snopes doesn't give a flying fuck about those. They just wanted this particular one banned, because it's "pro-Trump"; something that they not only make amply clear in their article, but are in fact boastful about. "We did this! Congratulations to us!"
Neutral fact-checking my ass.
However, they have in fact gone beyond that. Snopes.com is not anymore only a platform that expresses and promotes political opinions. It's an activist organization.
The main difference between just expressing your opinion (and, at the very most, trying to influence the opinions of your audience) and being an activist is whether your activities go beyond just your own platform where you publish your opinions. In other words, when you start actively reaching for other entities, like other people, institutions or companies, when you actively contact them and start to influence their behavior, that's when you start being an activist.
Snopes.com is not content with merely expressing their views, their opinions, and the results of their research on their own website. No, they actively contact other major websites and corporations to influence their actions towards people that they oppose. Thus making them political activists.
And they are quite proud of that, vocally boasting when their activism has had an effect. Consider, for example, their recent article: Facebook Removes Deceptive BL Network Following Snopes' Reporting.
Notice that "following Snopes' reporting" in the very title of the article. They could have left that part out of it, but no. They are so proud of having been the cause for this ban!
And if their motivations to reach for Facebook to have that group banned wasn't made clear, they make it quite clear in the article. Notice the wording:
In October 2019, Snopes first reported on a pro-Trump media outlet named The BL (“Beauty of Life”) “whose reach is rapidly expanding on Facebook and is linked in multiple ways to The Epoch Times,” a company already accused of Facebook violations.
They could have perfectly well left that "pro-Trump" word out, and the clarity of the sentence would have not been affected. But no. They wanted to make it quite clear why they wanted that group banned from Facebook. They wanted to make it amply clear to their readers that "these are the bad guys; after all, they are pro-Trump!"
Did that group use fraudulent means to get false engagement in Facebook, increasing their visibility? Maybe. Did they deserve to be banned from the platform? That's a complicated question.
However, I think it's quite clear what the actual motivation for Snopes was to actively pursue that particular group to be banned from Facebook. I'm quite certain that there are hundreds and hundreds of similar entities who are using similarly fraudulent means to get visibility on social media, and Snopes doesn't give a flying fuck about those. They just wanted this particular one banned, because it's "pro-Trump"; something that they not only make amply clear in their article, but are in fact boastful about. "We did this! Congratulations to us!"
Neutral fact-checking my ass.
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