Come on. You've highlighted one staff member as having once mentioned having a personal political leaning (like most people do) and that she once worked at a blog with a tarnished reputation and spun that into implying Snopes is untrustworthy. I'm sure you could meet this extremely low bar of "proof" for practically any news organization.

If you really want to present a case of bias, find some real evidence. Specific articles with specific instances of false or misleading information. Otherwise, you're just sowing doubt by casting aspersions based on vague associations.

This post wasn't meant to be a thorough debunking of Kim and snopes. I actually think snopes does a mostly good job of producing accurate information. However, it does show in some cases, such as the Hillary Libya "We didn't lose one person" question from the debate. http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-benghazi-msnbc/

Snopes and Kim claim "Hillary Clinton overlooked Benghazi victims when she said that "we didn't lose a single person in Libya" during a campaign event on MSNBC." is false. However, reading the article for her evidence, you can observe that Kim accepts Clinton lying by omission by saying the conversation was not about Benghazi.

Looking at this from a high level, Clinton is implying the the Benghazi attack is a completely unrelated event from the USA's war in Libya. However, these two events are both part of the Libyan intervention and it's disingenuous from Clinton to make such a claim because as a result of the Libyan intervention, Americans did die. Clinton is obviously playing a political game to play down the negative consequences of the Libyan intervention. I don't blame her for doing this, by the way. I would too if I wanted to be president.

Just because they didn't die in the initial confrontation doesn't mean "No Americans died." Snopes fails to point out the fact that Clinton does not include Benghazi in the overall Libyan confrontation. Let's say I am in a car accident with someone, and they are injured. If 6 months later, they have complications and die from the injuries I caused with the initial car accident, I am still responsible for the death of the individual.

Left wing bias: No Americans died in the initial confrontation with the Libyan government.

Right wing bias: Clinton killed Americans in Libya.

Neutral bias: Clinton made a decision to support the invasion of Libya. As a result of the invasion, Americans died in Benghazi.

> Neutral bias: Clinton made a decision to support the invasion of Libya. As a result of the invasion, Americans died in Benghazi.

Even that statement could be twisted if you draw the conclusion that Clinton supported the invasion, people died, therefore she is partly responsible. And it's missing information about the "600 requests for additional security".

I do understand and agree with your point.

Perhaps the more important issue is that some voters have an overly simplistic world view. "Casualties from an attack on a diplomatic enclave in a volatile country" should be separate from "US Foreign policy had implications for the conflict in Libya".

Agreed, the unbiased statement could definitely use some more words to show it's an opinion that Clinton COULD be responsible for the result, but it's not black and white. It's just frustrating that people don't recognize that yes, snopes, in general, is a trustworthy source. However, snopes is a group of people, each with their own individual biases.

These biases can occasionally influence the content. To treat these sources as some kind of perfect "machine" that can just be unleashed onto facebook to automatically say "You're wrong, this is how it really happened." is a scary thought. Especially when the process and machine are blackbox and we don't have any way to verify which "facts" are being pushed, by whom, and for what reasons. And when you bring up the fact that there might be bias, you become one of _those_ people, like you're some kind of conspiracy nut for asking questions.

I think that happened this election. The polls all said "Clinton crushes Trump." Anyone that asked about the validity of those polls was mocked and laughed at and seen as some kind of rightwing conspiracy nut.

Well, turns out they were dead wrong and maybe if people recognized their unconscious bias, we wouldn't have a president Trump right now and people would have said "Holy $@&* these polls are wrong we need to change our strategy so we can win." I kept repeating to people, don't underestimate Trump, he's smarter than you give him credit for and he's a huge threat to Clinton. Nothing but jokes and mockery from the majority of democrats I talked to.

Trump was a massive supporter of going into Libya[1] and doing "something" about Gaddafi. These world leaders are stuck with the hard problem of satisfying dumb idiots at home who think that the US can wave a wand and stop people across the sea from killing each other because it sucks seeing the poor brown people kill each other, yet they are only doing so because we meddled in their affairs before, and yet we are proposing to solve it by meddling in their affairs more. The US, including Trump, asked for Libya, and now Clinton is on the hook because the US population is too misinformed to understand why Libya is on edge, why it was America's fault, and why there will be no easy solution because, again, until America stops doing this it won't stop.

This is the issue. Americans don't know what they want and are mad because they feel like they somehow have a special place in the world everyone else is "stealing" from them somehow. This attitude is "anti-American" because it is the unfortunate truth, and America just voted that the truth hurts but it would rather blame it on the immigrants and mexicans and muslims. This is scary. You cannot have the attitude that you somehow have a god-given "right" to jobs in your country, and that filthy immigrants are stealing them because they are bad people. Conservatives feel like the government is a credit card they can use to get more when they want it, no matter what the consequence for the rest of the world. This entitlement is a style of attitude and thinking that is guaranteed to cause global conflict, and is the inevitable end of a culture war between western thinking and other powers. Obama proposed to fix this by being basically an apologist and reparist for the rest of the world, but the rest of the world is so fucked up because of America's history of trying to decide what's best for it that it is starting to turn on America, and deciding it doesn't really need them any more. This stubborness is war-mongering and why it is better to have free trade and globalism rather than using literal direct conflict to solve perceived differences between countries.

[1]: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...

In fairness, I should mention that by "auto snopes" I mean "implement an auto-debunker" or even just "auto fair balance" which automatically adds "the other side" to anything linked on facebook.

I have no hat in the ring with respect to which side publishes the truth, I just think that if something is FALSE facebook could alter their UI to immediately debunk something.

Like the other quote of Trump saying "I'd run as a republican because they're the dumbest" could have a big "FALSE - he never said that" right underneath.

People who thought it was funny could still post it until their hearts were content - but nobody would be FOOLED

Thanks for clarifying that! I don't have any skin in this game either, and I agree it might be helpful to have an auto-bias feature, but it needs to be completely transparent and open so we can fact-check the fact-check checkers ourselves :) Someone must fact-check the fact checkers, and facebook should do their best to ensure this is possible with any system they decide to implement.

Your comment is missing the link to the snopes article that's wrong.