For literally decades (the website was first created in 1994), Snopes was a really interesting and quite high-quality fact-checking website that dealt primarily with urban legends, widely circulating anecdotes, and other such stories, researching whether they were based on real events or completely fictitious. For a very long time it was a quite good source of information (perhaps not in itself a good authoritative source per se, but a good starting point for further investigation into urban legends and stories).
For quite a long time I thought that the people behind the website were (and perhaps they really are) Christians, and perhaps even American conservatives. That's because semi-regularly they would upload articles with titles like "prayers requested for (such and such person)" which typically dealt with a missing person, or a person that had suffered some accident or other misfortune, and in many cases these were ranked as "true". Given how these articles were titled and phrased, specifically mentioning "prayers", led me to believe that the authors are religious Christians. Or at least were back in the day. Given how openly and unashamedly they were so, I kind of assumed that they were more on the American conservative side of the political spectrum.
Either the management of the website has been completely replaced over the decades, or the original authors are not as conservative as I thought, because it turns out that Snopes has become as much a regressive leftist propaganda website as the worst examples of leftist mainstream media. A website that once prided itself for its accurate fact-checking is now distorting stories for political propaganda.
Consider, for example, their article titled "a "newly uncovered" photograph reveals Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was crying over an empty parking lot, not detained migrant children, at a protest in Texas."
This is classified as "false".
The article is rather full of regressive leftist rhetoric, such as naming the people who have presented the criticism as "conspiracy trolls", and "viral conspiracy and junk news websites", and naming the whole thing a "conspiracy theory".
But anyway, what is their reasoning to classify the claim as "false"? I kid you not, it's this:
Yeah, as if that were the main point of the criticism.
The point of the criticism was that she was faking it. The published photographs were deliberately framed to give the impression that she was looking at a tent camp full of children through a fence, even though she wasn't. No tents and no children were visible at all from that vantage point, only a large empty field with a road leading to a huge building in the distance, with nobody (except the guards at the other side of the fence) visible. And she was quite clearly faking her emotions (something that even many leftists are criticizing her for.)
But this is all "false". Why? Because what was on the other side of the fence wasn't a parking lot, and because the photographs showing what was on the other side of the fence were published a year ago, rather than recently.
Snopes is deliberately and deceitfully missing the entire point here, nitpicking about inconsequential details, rather than dealing with the main claim. While at the same time engaging in argumentum ad hominem attacks against people like Paul Joseph Watson in that same article:
For quite a long time I thought that the people behind the website were (and perhaps they really are) Christians, and perhaps even American conservatives. That's because semi-regularly they would upload articles with titles like "prayers requested for (such and such person)" which typically dealt with a missing person, or a person that had suffered some accident or other misfortune, and in many cases these were ranked as "true". Given how these articles were titled and phrased, specifically mentioning "prayers", led me to believe that the authors are religious Christians. Or at least were back in the day. Given how openly and unashamedly they were so, I kind of assumed that they were more on the American conservative side of the political spectrum.
Either the management of the website has been completely replaced over the decades, or the original authors are not as conservative as I thought, because it turns out that Snopes has become as much a regressive leftist propaganda website as the worst examples of leftist mainstream media. A website that once prided itself for its accurate fact-checking is now distorting stories for political propaganda.
Consider, for example, their article titled "a "newly uncovered" photograph reveals Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was crying over an empty parking lot, not detained migrant children, at a protest in Texas."
This is classified as "false".
The article is rather full of regressive leftist rhetoric, such as naming the people who have presented the criticism as "conspiracy trolls", and "viral conspiracy and junk news websites", and naming the whole thing a "conspiracy theory".
But anyway, what is their reasoning to classify the claim as "false"? I kid you not, it's this:
Police weren’t guarding an empty parking lot, and the photographs weren’t newly uncovered.That's it. I'm not joking. I'm not cherry-picking one very minor side point among a plethora of stronger evidence and arguments against the original claim. No, this is their whole reasoning to classify the claim as "false". There wasn't a parking lot on the other side of the fence, but a road. And the photographs showing what she was looking at, ie. the other side of the fence, were published a year ago, not recently. That's their entire argument to classify this as "false".
Yeah, as if that were the main point of the criticism.
The point of the criticism was that she was faking it. The published photographs were deliberately framed to give the impression that she was looking at a tent camp full of children through a fence, even though she wasn't. No tents and no children were visible at all from that vantage point, only a large empty field with a road leading to a huge building in the distance, with nobody (except the guards at the other side of the fence) visible. And she was quite clearly faking her emotions (something that even many leftists are criticizing her for.)
But this is all "false". Why? Because what was on the other side of the fence wasn't a parking lot, and because the photographs showing what was on the other side of the fence were published a year ago, rather than recently.
Snopes is deliberately and deceitfully missing the entire point here, nitpicking about inconsequential details, rather than dealing with the main claim. While at the same time engaging in argumentum ad hominem attacks against people like Paul Joseph Watson in that same article:
Paul Joseph Watson, the InfoWars Twitter personality who helped boost the bogus “empty parking lot” story, was also key in pushing unfounded claims in April 2019 that the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was intentionally set by Muslims.Firstly, that's not true. Secondly, even if it were 100% true, so what? That has no relevance on the veracity of the claim being discussed here. This is an argumentum ad hominem in its purest form.
Comments
Post a Comment