But there are quite a few things, like the allegations of criminal activity (e.g. embezzlement) going on at Snopes that reasonable people might have questions about with respect to their fact-checking operations.
I neither know nor much care how their operation runs, and it's not my purpose to defend it. To be honest I've never especially liked the people who run it; their deconstructions of internet rumors are often snarky and shallow, and undermine their factual value with distracting tone issues - but that's how they choose to run their business. I'm just pointing to the fact of the site's general reliability as a fact-checking service over a long period.
http://kalevleetaru.com/vita.pdf
David Mikkelson's c.v.:
?
(disclaimer: I know Kalev slightly)
It was with incredible surprise therefore that I received David’s one-sentence response which read in its entirety “I'd be happy to speak with you, but I can only address some aspects in general because I'm precluded by the terms of a binding settlement agreement from discussing details of my divorce.”
This absolutely astounded me. Here was the one of the world’s most respected fact checking organizations, soon to be an ultimate arbitrator of “truth” on Facebook, saying that it cannot respond to a fact checking request because of a secrecy agreement.
In short, when someone attempted to fact check the fact checker, the response was the equivalent of “its secret.”
It is impossible to understate how antithetical this is to the fact checking world, in which absolute openness and transparency are necessary prerequisites for trust. How can fact checking organizations like Snopes expect the public to place trust in them if when they themselves are called into question, their response is that they can’t respond.
What's so astonishing about it? A divorce settlement in which the parties agree not to talk about each other in public isn't scandalous, and it's not like these people are on the public payroll; rather, they provide a service, have built a good brand from the overall high reliability of that service (notwithstanding a lack of total perfection), and the market has been largely satisfied with the quality of the offering. Divorces happen and they're sometimes bitter and contentious. So what?
I don't really care how Snopes is run as long as it consistently provides a high quality of information, while being aware of variations in the quality of their output from time to time. I have certainly found it a more reliable source of information, on average, than the Daily Mail or indeed Forbes over a period going back to its founding.